Public sector performance and public spending efficiency: An international comparative analysis using the DEA approach on a panel of ۴۰ countries

Objective: This article evaluates the efficiency of public expenditure allocation to optimize the overall performance of the public sector. Conducted on a panel of forty countries stratified by income level, this study highlights the crucial dimension of expenditure quality. This issue, which remains marginally explored in recent empirical literature, takes on a particular urgency in a context of structural and perpetual growth of global public budgets.Methods: Methodological rigor rests on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non-parametric approach highly suitable for estimating relative technical efficiency scores from annual data covering the ۲۰۱۵-۲۰۲۵ period. Furthermore, the integration of the Malmquist productivity index captures the dynamic trajectory of public sector performance and disentangles efficiency variations from technological shifts.Results: Empirical estimations reveal substantial technical inefficiency over the entire period, characterized by a disconnect between the hierarchy of scores and countries' income levels. Counterintuitively, middle-income economies, particularly those in the lower-middle bracket, display a better average optimization of their budgetary resources compared to high-income countries. The latter suffer from diminishing marginal returns, attributable to the relative hypertrophy of their public sector.Conclusions: The study advocates for a strategic realignment and a structural reconfiguration of budgetary allocation rather than quantitative expansion for high and middle-income countries. For low-income economies, strengthening institutional quality proves imperative to guarantee increased resilience against exogenous macroeconomic shocks.

کلیدواژه ها:

DEA ، efficiency ، Public-sector-performance ، Public-spending