Local government efficiency: the case of Moroccan municipalities

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Periodical article

Title:	Local government efficiency: the case of Moroccan municipalities
Authors:	El Mehdi, Rachida Hafner, Christian M.
Year:	2014
Periodical:	African Development Review (ISSN 1467-8268)
Volume:	26
Issue:	1
Pages:	88-101
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Morocco
Subjects:	local government municipal government efficiency financial management population
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8268.12066
Abstract:	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 the authors focus on measuring the efficiency of Moroccan municipalities in terms of their financial autonomy in 1998/1999. They 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 them to construct confidence intervals for the estimated efficiencies, and test for the returns to scale. The 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. App., bibliogr., notes, sum. [Journal abstract]