Public Spending Efficiency in the OECD: Benchmarking Health Care, Education, and General Administration
Data publikacji: 18 wrz 2020
Zakres stron: 253 - 280
Otrzymano: 22 sty 2018
Przyjęty: 26 maj 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/revecp-2020-0013
Słowa kluczowe
© 2020 Richard Dutu et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.
In many OECD countries, changes in demography and health conditions are putting pressure on public finance. To prevent further expansion of government spending as a percentage of GDP, public spending efficiency will need to be raised. This paper uses data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the efficiency of welfare spending (normalized by the working-age population) in a sample of OECD countries around 2012, focussing on health care, secondary education, and general public services. The DEA model has a two input-one output structure, with at least one of the variables representing a composite indicator controlling for country-specific factors (socio-economic environment and lifestyle factors, for example). We find wide dispersion in efficiency measures across OECD countries and provide possible quantified improvements for both output and input efficiency.