EFFECT OF DECENTRALISATION POLICIES IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION ON EFFICIENCY OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN CENTRAL EUROPE – THE CASE OF CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA

Abstract

Public administration reforms in European countries have led to several policies of decentralization within which competencies of local state governments were transferred to regional and municipal self-governments with the aim to improve efficiency of public services delivery. In this paper we present empirical comparative analysis of efficiency of municipal offices providing services in the field of building order in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The two countries provide the competence under two different policies. The policy of the Czech Republic is based on categorization of municipalities into three categories defined by law. Local governments in municipalities of the 2nd category are given competences to provide services for a defined set of surrounding municipalities. The policy applied in Slovakia is based on the principle of voluntary cooperation of municipalities in creation of so called joint municipal offices. The objective of this study is to analyse which policy is more efficient. The analysis has been performed on the year 2014 samples of municipalities of Pardubice region in the Czech Republic and Nitra region in Slovakia. In the analysis we employed standard Data Envelopment Analysis methodology for estimation of efficiency scores separately for each country. Resulting scores depict managerial efficiency within the policies of the two countries. To estimate policy efficiencies, we employ a metafrontier approach, that is we calculate managerially efficient performances of offices in both countries and run the “inter-policy” efficiency analysis on the new meta data of both countries. The new efficiency scores can be then attributed to the effect of the two different policies. The results of our analysis show that offices in the Czech Republic are on average more efficient than offices in Slovakia, although statistical test has not confirmed that the difference is significant. It leads to a conclusion that the difference between efficiencies of policies employed in the Czech Republic and Slovakia is not significant.