Identifying the Determinants of Judicial Performance: Taxpayers’ Money Well Spent?

Judicial Performance and its Determinants

“…Cross-country differences in trial length do not appear related to the amount of resources devoted to justice Consistent with previous research (Buscaglia and Dakolias, 1999, Rosales-López, 2008, Cross and Donelson, 2010, Voigt and El Bialy, 2012, there is no apparent link between the budget allocated to justice and the performance of the systems in the data assembled by the OECD. Figure 7 displays the amount of Note: The budget includes the amount of financial resources allocated to all courts, excluding resources for legal aid and public prosecution services.…”

“…The impact of court specialisation on performance is also analysed in Voigt and El Bialy (2012). Using the CEPEJ dataset, the authors find that court specialisation, as measured by the ratio of specialised first instance courts to all first instance courts of a country, is inversely related to the number of resolved cases divided by caseload.…”

The Economics of Civil Justice

“…As found in other studies (Cross and Donelson, 2010;Voigt and El Bialy, 2012), no statistically significant correlation between the budget allocated to justice and the performance of the systems emerges from the analysis of the data assembled by the OECD. Figure 12 displays the amount of financial resources devoted to the functioning of courts as a percentage of GDP across OECD countries.…”

“…For instance, in Spain the reduction of formalism granted by the civil procedural law reform in 2000 may have increased trial length through increased demand of judicial services (Mora-Sanguinetti, 2010). Using the CEPEJ dataset, Voigt and El-Bialy (2012) do not find any significant correlation between the degree of procedural formalism and the resolution rate (number of resolved cases divided by the caseload), once controlling for legal origins.…”

“…For instance, higher uncertainty on judicial outcomes seems to affect, and potentially increase, demand (Dari Mattiacci and Deffains, 2007). On the supply side, various papers analyse the impact of judicial resources (Buscaglia and Dakolias, 1999, Rosales-López, 2008, Cross and Donelson, 2010, salaries (Buscaglia andDakolias, 1999, Deyneli, 2012), specialisation of courts (Garoupa et al 2010;Voigt and El Bialy, 2012), size of courts (Marchesi, 2003;Voigt and El Bialy, 2012), presence of judicial councils and judges' incentives (Voigt and El Bialy, 2012) on various measures (subjective and objective) of court performance. In general, these studies agree on the absence of a clear-cut relationship between budget and performance.…”