Local government efficiency: reviewing determinants and setting new trends

Abstract

This paper has reviewed the international literature on the explaining factors of efficiency of local governments from 1990 to June 2019. The main objective of this work is to explore the dynamics of the development of this line of research, not only to find out the terminology preferences that have dominated the pre-and post-crisis period in this field but also to identify the latest worldwide research trends. For this purpose, a bibliometric and cluster analysis by fractional accounting has been carried out. The principal result of this article is twofold. First, during the whole period 1990-2019, the ranking of the most used terms is dominated by the keywords of the publications in the second subperiod 2008-2019. Second, the analysis of the latest trends, which has been extended until June 2021, shows that in recent years, the study of the determinants of local government efficiency has revolved around concepts related to environmental issues and new forms of local management.

Efficiency and sustainability in municipal social policies

“…To isolate the impact of SDG compliance on efficiency, model 1 controls for the effect of some demographic, economic, and political factors, as evidenced in the literature (Milán‐García et al, 2022; Narbón‐Perpiñá & De Witte, 2018b).…”

“…Much of the empirical literature on efficiency in public services has focused on studying the various factors influencing it. In this sense, Narbón‐Perpiñá and De Witte (2018b) and Milán‐García et al (2022) review the literature on the explanatory factors of the efficiency of local public services. Specifically, Narbón‐Perpiñá and De Witte (2018b) classify these factors into several categories: social and demographic (population density, size of the municipality, educational level, percentage of immigrants, share of homeowners, etc.…”

Systematic reviews as a metaknowledge tool: caveats and a review of available options

“…15. The core publications are Catalano et al (2019), Daraio et al (2020), Mergoni and De Witte (2022), Narbón-Perpiñá and De Witte (2018a, 2018b), and Milán-García et al (2022. They compose the core of ITOR reviews over the years.…”

Efficiency evaluation of healthcare services in China based on stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis and directional distance function

“…DEA, a nonparametric data-driven method introduced by Charnes et al (1978), received significant interest from researchers because it can convert the optimization of multiple inputs and outputs into an efficiency score (Ruiz and Sirvent, 2020;Podinovski, 2021); such a method "lets the data speak for themselves" (Cherchye et al, 2013). In addition, DEA is not limited by a specific functional form between inputs and outputs; it avoids any assumptions as in statistical methods (Adelman, 2020;Daraio et al, 2020;Milán-García et al, 2022). As the DEA methodology has distinct advantages, and the healthcare service system involves multiple inputs (e.g., beds and medical staff) and multiple outputs (e.g., outpatient visits and patient discharges), the DEA has been extensively used in the field of healthcare services.…”