Measurement of the public sector efficiency and performance in mena region via composite index approach

Abstract

Interest for the public sector performance and efficiency has considerably grown. Their measurement is an important feature since they are connected to the public budget and their rational use. Our paper slot into this interest for North African and Middle East countries commonly known as MENA region where recent contests against absolute political regimes, human right violation, political corruption, an overtime economic decline and high unemployment rate especially within the youth suggest the failure of their public sector to fulfill its basic functions shared into first, opportunity functions which reflect the quality of the administrative, education, health and the infrastructure and second, Musgravian functions such as the stabilization of the economy, assessing the overall economic performance and an efficient distribution of wealth. Reaching the objective mentioned above, composite indicator approach has been applied to capture the level of public sector performance and efficiency and data envelopment analysis DEA to capture their technical inefficiency for the first time in a sample of MENA countries. Our results suggest that they do not much derive from results obtained in identical previous studies for new EU members and emergent markets countries.