IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ete/leerwp/656607.html

Service level provision in municipalities: a flexible directional distance composite indicator

Author

Listed:
  • Giovanna D'Inverno
  • Kristof De Witte

Abstract

With increasing decentralization of public activities to the municipalities, it has become imperative to deploy an enhanced service provision analysis at the local level. This paper suggests the innovative use of a composite indicator to measure the multidimensional aspects of the local public provision comprising of several commonly administered municipal tasks. We propose a robust conditional version of a directional distance composite indicator with weight restrictions based on the municipal expenditure composition. Specifically, we deal with the presence of “undesirable” municipal service indicators and with the heterogeneity among the municipalities in their political preferences, priority public activities and operating environment characteristics. To illustrate the applicability of the suggested method, we show the construction of the municipal service provision composite indicator for 307 Flemish municipalities over the year 2006–2011.

Suggested Citation

  • Giovanna D'Inverno & Kristof De Witte, 2020. "Service level provision in municipalities: a flexible directional distance composite indicator," Working Papers of LEER - Leuven Economics of Education Research 656607, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LEER - Leuven Economics of Education Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:ete:leerwp:656607
    Note: paper number DPS20.11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/d82fe844-7e6b-4a9d-9029-12362c67f23e
    File Function: Published version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Zhou, Yi & Zhou, Wenji & Wei, Chu, 2023. "Environmental performance of the Chinese cement enterprise: An empirical analysis using a text-based directional vector," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 125(C).
    3. Titl, Vitezslav & De Witte, Kristof, 2022. "How politics influence public good provision," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    4. Miguel Alves Pereira & Giovanna D’Inverno & Ana Santos Camanho, 2025. "Learning mobility in European higher education: How has the Union’s flagship initiative progressed?," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 351(2), pages 1589-1619, August.
    5. Jiménez-Fernández, Eduardo & Sánchez, Angeles & Ortega-Pérez, Mario, 2022. "Dealing with weighting scheme in composite indicators: An unsupervised distance-machine learning proposal for quantitative data," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    6. Titl, Vitezslav & De Witte, Kristof & Geys, Benny, 2021. "Political donations, public procurement and government efficiency," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    7. D’Inverno, Giovanna & Vidoli, Francesco & De Witte, Kristof, 2023. "Sustainable budgeting and financial balance: Which lever will you pull?," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 309(2), pages 857-871.
    8. Vidoli, F. & Fusco, E. & Pignataro, G. & Guccio, C., 2024. "Multi-directional Robust Benefit of the Doubt model: An application to the measurement of the quality of acute care services in OECD countries," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    9. Carina Steckenleiter & Michael Lechner & Tim Pawlowski & Ute Schüttoff, 2023. "Do local expenditures on sports facilities affect sports participation?," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 61(4), pages 1103-1128, October.
    10. Iliopoulos, Panagiotis & De Witte, Kristof, 2024. "The expenditure composition and trade-offs in local government budgets," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    11. Paolo Postiglione & Alfredo Cartone & M. Simona Andreano & Roberto Benedetti, 2023. "Constrained optimization for addressing spatial heterogeneity in principal component analysis: an application to composite indicators," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 32(5), pages 1539-1561, December.
    12. D’Inverno, Giovanna & Carosi, Laura & Romano, Giulia, 2021. "Environmental sustainability and service quality beyond economic and financial indicators: A performance evaluation of Italian water utilities," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    13. Mosnier, Claire & Boukhriss, Sanae & Minviel, Jean-Joseph, 2023. "Does pig production improves cattle farm sustainability in the French massif central? A hierarchical constrained directional benefit-of-the-doubt approach," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 210(C).
    14. D'Inverno, Giovanna & Moesen, Wim & De Witte, Kristof, 2022. "Local government size and service level provision. Evidence from conditional non-parametric analysis," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    15. Vilarinho, Hermilio & Pereira, Miguel Alves & D’Inverno, Giovanna & Nóvoa, Henriqueta & Camanho, Ana S., 2024. "Water Utility Service Quality Index: A customer-centred approach for assessing the quality of service in the water sector," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    16. Laura Carosi & Ana Camanho & Giovanna D’Inverno & Kristof Witte & Rossana Riccardi, 2020. "Preface to the special issue on performance measurement and efficiency analysis—theory and practice," Decisions in Economics and Finance, Springer;Associazione per la Matematica, vol. 43(2), pages 409-412, December.
    17. Mergoni, Anna & Emrouznejad, Ali & De Witte, Kristof, 2025. "Fifty years of Data Envelopment Analysis," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 326(3), pages 389-412.
    18. Vilarinho, Hermilio & D’Inverno, Giovanna & Nóvoa, Henriqueta & Camanho, Ana S., 2023. "Performance analytics for regulation in retail water utilities: Guiding asset management by identifying peers and targets," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    19. José Antonio, Palomero-González & Vicent, Almenar-Llongo & Ramón, Fuentes-Pascual, 2022. "A composite indicator index as a proxy for measuring the quality of water supply as perceived by users for urban water services," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    20. Vilarinho, Hermilio & D’Inverno, Giovanna & Nóvoa, Henriqueta & Camanho, Ana S., 2023. "The measurement of asset management performance of water companies," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 87(PA).
    21. Vidoli, F.; & Fusco, E.; & Pignataro, G.; & Guccio, C.;, 2023. "Multi-directional Robust Benefit of the Doubt model: a comprehensive measure for the quality of health care in OECD countries," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 23/14, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    22. Vidoli, Francesco & Auteri, Monica & Marinuzzi, Giorgia & Tortorella, Walter, 2023. "Spatial interdependence in cost efficiency and local government optimal size: The case of Italian municipalities," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    23. Claudio Thieme & Víctor Giménez & Diego Prior & Emili Tortosa-Ausina, 2023. "Health vs. Wealth: A Cross-country Analysis of Managerial Effectiveness of the COVID-19," Working Papers 2023/10, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    24. Giménez, Víctor & Prior, Diego & Thieme, Claudio & Tortosa-Ausina, Emili, 2024. "International comparisons of COVID-19 pandemic management: What can be learned from activity analysis techniques?," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    25. Matheus Pereira Libório & Lívia Maria Leite Silva & Petr Iakovlevitch Ekel & Letícia Ribeiro Figueiredo & Patrícia Bernardes, 2022. "Consensus-Based Sub-Indicator Weighting Approach: Constructing Composite Indicators Compatible with Expert Opinion," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 164(3), pages 1073-1099, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ete:leerwp:656607. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: library EBIB (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://feb.kuleuven.be/drc/LEER .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.