Applications of Data Envelopment Analysis to Evaluate Resource Mobilization and Regional Integration Outcomes: Recent Trends and Future Challenges

The literature that uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) for policy analysis is thriving and has expanded from studies evaluating efficiency at the micro level to macroeconomic applications of DEA, assessing efficiency across different domains at the country, regional, and global levels. This chapter reviews recent trends in this body of literature, focusing on applications of DEA in the contexts of national resource mobilization and regional economic integration. These applications have been particularly influential in informing policymakers in the international development community, as several recent World Bank reports involving insights obtained from DEA demonstrate. In addition, this literature has developed a new approach to not only compare achieved absolute levels of outcomes but also to track relative performance by accounting for each country’s and region’s individual economic structure and associated capacity. Despite recent progress on some of the methodological issues facing the application of DEA, several challenges remain. The chapter discusses possible avenues for future research to address these challenges, including refinements on existing techniques for DEA and exploring new ways of combining DEA with other methods, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.