Efficiency in the Public Sector: Studies in Productivity and Efficiency
本书汇集1997年悉尼国际公共部门效率会议论文，探讨如何用生产前沿面方法评估公共部门绩效，并分析微观经济改革、资源分配与私有化的影响。
The Public Sector accounts for a significant share of economic activity in Western countries. Therefore, assessing its performance is quite important. Several techniques have been developed to this purpose. Among these, the one based on the concept of ‘production frontier’ has become very popular. International experts in this field met at the International Conference on the Public Sector Efficiency, organised by the Centre for Applied Economic Research (CAER) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 27–28 November 1997, to discuss how to use the ‘frontier’ in the public sector and this book, edited by Kevin Fox, contains their works. It is divided into two parts: the first part is titled ‘Issues in Public Sector Efficiency Evaluation’ while the second part is titled ‘Efficiency Analysis in the Public Sector‐Advances in Theory and Practice’. In Part 1, Knox Lovell discusses why efficiency in the public sector matters, while Quiggin analyses critically the impact of microeconomic reforms experienced by several countries; more interestingly he shows that frontier methodology can be used to assess the potential impact of this type of reform. Yaisawarng presents a very interesting DEA‐based procedure to allocate resources among units in a PA allowing to link specific efficiency targets to both incentive and monitoring mechanisms. Finally, Grafton and Squires analyse the impact of the privatisation of a common pool of resources.