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Local Government Efficiency: The Case of Moroccan Municipalities

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  • Rachida El Mehdi
  • Christian M. Hafner

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> In times of tight public budgets and deficits, the topic of measuring local government efficiency increasingly becomes important, both for policymakers in the central governments, and for researchers working on the methodology. In this work we focus on measuring the efficiency of Moroccan municipalities in terms of their financial autonomy in 1998/99. We use traditional non-parametric approaches, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and the Free Disposal Hull (FDH), combined with bias corrections using the bootstrap, which also allows us to construct confidence intervals for the estimated efficiencies, and test for the returns to scale. Our results indicate that very few municipalities are efficient or close to the frontier. Both DEA and FDH efficiency scores indicate that there is a negative relation between population size and efficiency scores, which is unlike previous studies for other countries.

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  • Rachida El Mehdi & Christian M. Hafner, 2014. "Local Government Efficiency: The Case of Moroccan Municipalities," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 26(1), pages 88-101, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:afrdev:v:26:y:2014:i:1:p:88-101
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    1. Francesco Aiello & Graziella Bonanno & Luigi Capristo, 2017. "Explaining Differences In Efficiency: The Case Of Local Government Literature," Working Papers 201704, Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF.
    2. Francesco Aiello & Graziella Bonanno, 2019. "Explaining Differences In Efficiency: A Meta‐Study On Local Government Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(3), pages 999-1027, July.
    3. Isabel Narbón-Perpiñá & Mª Teresa Balaguer-Coll & Marko Petrovic & Emili Tortosa-Ausina, 2017. "Which estimator to measure local governments’ cost efficiency? An application to Spanish municipalities," Working Papers 2017/06, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    4. William Orlando Prieto Bustos & Joan Miguel Tejedor Estupiñán, 2019. "Eficiencia Técnica de las Instituciones Públicas Locales en Colombia," Revista de Estudios Regionales, Universidades Públicas de Andalucía, vol. 2, pages 15-41.
    5. Bruno Emmanuel Ongo Nkoa & Djondandi Wangbara & Gautier Tchoffo Tameko, 2024. "Efficiency of local public spending in Cameroon: Does population size matter?," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 36(2), pages 362-376, June.
    6. Isabel Narbón-Perpiñá & Kristof De Witte, 2016. "Local governments’ efficiency: A systematic literature review – Part II," Working Papers 2016/21, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    7. Isabel Narbón-Perpiñá & Maria Teresa Balaguer-Coll & Marko Petrović & Emili Tortosa-Ausina, 2020. "Which estimator to measure local governments’ cost efficiency? The case of Spanish municipalities," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 11(1), pages 51-82, March.

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