Local Government Efficiency in German Municipalities

This article evaluates German local governments’ cost efficiency using a sample of 1,021 municipalities in the state of Baden-Württemberg for the year 2001. We thereby concentrate on overall or ‘global’ efficiency scores—rather than estimate efficiency for one particular service—and explicitly accou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRaumforschung und Raumordnung Vol. 71; no. 4; pp. 283 - 293
Main Authors Geys, Benny, Heinemann, Friedrich, Kalb, Alexander
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
German
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 31.08.2013
Sciendo
oekom verlag GmbH
Subjects
Deutsche Kommunen
Earth and Environmental Science
Geography
German municipalities
Landscape/Regional and Urban Planning
Local government performance
Rezension
Stochastic frontier analysis
Öffentliche Leistungserstellung
Local government performance
German municipalities
Stochastic frontier analysis
Öffentliche Leistungserstellung
Deutsche Kommunen
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Summary:This article evaluates German local governments’ cost efficiency using a sample of 1,021 municipalities in the state of Baden-Württemberg for the year 2001. We thereby concentrate on overall or ‘global’ efficiency scores—rather than estimate efficiency for one particular service—and explicitly account for exogenous or non-discretionary influences. The latter not only corrects for influences possibly beyond the control of local policy-makers, but also allows some indication of the determinants of such ‘global’ efficiency. Our results indicate that there is a substantial divergence in efficiency across municipalities despite a homogeneous institutional setting. As especially smaller municipalities appear less efficient, these results support a case for policy programmes aimed at boundary reviews or more extensive inter-communal cooperation among small municipalities.
ISSN:0034-0111
1869-4179
DOI:10.1007/s13147-012-0191-x