Abstract
Local governments of advanced countries often have financial problems. Most central governments promote re-organization of local governments into larger local governments in order to reduce operating costs. Although cost reductions have been discussed by governments, political parties, economic institutes, etc, changes in industrial efficiency in regions governed by local governments have been overlooked. In this paper, we evaluate the industrial efficiency and the corresponding returns to scale (RTS). We present input–output tables that provide data of regional economies, network data envelopment analysis algorithms to measure the industrial efficiency, and an algorithm to measure the RTS. The Japanese government has proposed plans to merge prefectures, which are equivalent to counties in Britain, into larger states. The results obtained by applying the proposed algorithm to these plans demonstrate that a number of the new states will suffer from decreased RTS and will experience reduced efficiency.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Hitomi of the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry of Japan for providing the input–output table.
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Appendix
Appendix
SBM algorithms for matrix-type organizations
As the SBM algorithms presented by Tone (2001, 2002) are described in Cooper et al (2007), we omit their explanations. The SBM algorithm for matrix-type organizations is the same as the network DEA algorithms using SBM presented by Tone and Tsutsui (2009). This algorithm is obtained by replacing Equation (3) with the following equation:
Super efficiency of matrix-type organizations is measured using the following equation, which is obtained modifying the SBM algorithm presented by Tone (2002):
subject to
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Amatatsu, H., Ueda, T. & Amatatsu, Y. Efficiency and returns-to-scale of local governments. J Oper Res Soc 63, 299–305 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2011.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jors.2011.38