MULTIDIMENSIONAL OBJECTIVE FUNCTIONS AND INSTITUTIONS: EFFICIENCY ASSESSMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICES
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2019-12-31
影响因子: 4.149
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 经济学 - 2区
• 小类 : 经济学 - 2区
• 小类 : 管理学 - 3区
• 小类 : 运筹学与管理科学 - 3区
Overview
The primary role of public administrations - at national and local level - as leading agents for the provision of public services has gained increased attention as a result of the economic challenges resulting from the economic downturn that hit most countries after 2008. These policy efforts have materialized in economic reforms that condition the funding and performance evaluation of public services.
In parallel, scholars and policy observers have fuelled the debate on what elements form the objective function of public service providers as well as on how to model the technology of public services for evaluation purposes. These concerns have become evident in the approach adopted by many academic studies dealing with efficiency assessments in a number of public services, including among others higher education, health care, and the functioning of local governments.
Because of the relevance of the efficiency analysis of public services and institutions for academics and policy makers, this special issue encourages authors to develop research that challenges canonical analyses by proposing relevant research questions, and by adopting critical perspectives that seek to shed valuable insights on the efficiency of public service providers as well as of specific policies designed to enhance the functioning of both public service providers and market-related agents. Prospective papers should contribute to fertilize the debate on the efficiency assessment of public sectors, while promoting theory-led models that permit to improve the modelling of the production function of public service providers.
This special issue ofSocio-Economic Planning Sciencestherefore invites the entire academic and policy-making communities to submit novel and original contributions connected to, but not be limited to, the following topics:
What are the antecedents and challenges ahead of public sector efficiency analyses?
What developments in estimation methods can contribute to improve our understanding of the sources of efficiency of public sector agents?
Given the multidimensionality of the objective function of public sector agents, what can we learn from the efficiency analysis of public service providers? Is the direction of technical change (in terms of policy choices) a relevant factor explaining productivity differences cross public sector agents and cross time?
What policy lessons can be drawn from empirical applications focused on efficiency evaluation of public services (e.g., frontier estimation methods, performance measurements and other techniques)? Are the policy implications resulting from efficiency assessment of both public services and specific policies designed to promote local economic activity (e.g., industrial clusters, national or supra-national funding of public service providers or local economic activity, and investments in the entrepreneurial ecosystem) consistent in developing and developed settings?