Technical efficiency of local public institutions in Colombia = Eficiencia Técnica de las Instituciones Públicas Locales en Colombia

Abstract

The impact on local public government efficiency over poverty levels were estimated for 23 major cities in Colombia in 2010 by implementing a Data Envelopment Analysis followed by a Tobit model, as proposed in the recent literature on public efficiency analysis. The output is a Multidimensional Poverty Index, whereas institutional capacity is considered as an input, and it is measured using a Fiscal Performance Index (FPI) and a Transparency Performance Index (TPI). This allows to establish the extent of possible improvements of local institutions relative to the best practices frontier, and to identify which environmental factors are relevant when explaining the differences among relative efficiency scores. The main finding suggest that poor institutional settings increase the cost of poverty reductions, which means that all cities in the sample could improve performance on poverty without increasing spending. In terms of environmental factors population, unemployment rate, informal labor market share, and the distance of each city to the central government capital have negative impacts on the efficiency score, while internet access have a positive impact on the efficiency score for the sample of cities. = Utilizando un modelo teórico recursivo basado en la sinergia cognitiva medida por cinco dimensiones (económica, judicial, civil conflictiva, geográfica y urbana) como restricciones para permitir mejores resultados sobre la calidad institucional, la investigación muestra un vínculo entre el entorno económico, social y político con la eficiencia pública en los gobiernos locales. Los impactos sobre la eficiencia del gobierno público local de los diferentes niveles de avance para cada dimensión fueron estimados para 23 ciudades principales en Colombia en 2010 mediante la implementación de un Análisis de Envolvente de Datos seguido de un modelo Tobit, similar al que se ha propuesto en la literatura reciente de análisis de eficiencia pública.