Assessing the Efficiency of Local Entities in the Provision of Public Sports Facilities

Abstract

In recent years, Spanish municipal authorities have been devoting important amounts of their resources to financing the construction and maintenance of sports facilities. However, the current financial climate has led to a decrease in the resources available, while demand by citizens has continued to grow. Management must therefore become more efficient if quality services are to continue to be offered. Analysis of the factors that affect efficiency of local entities provides important strategic information. A twostage double bootstrap procedure was used to estimate the efficiency determinants of Spanish local entities in the provision of public sports facilities. In the first stage, robust efficiency estimates were obtained with a data envelopment analysis (DEA). We applied the nonparametric double bootstrap model by Simar and Wilson (2007), which is based on a truncated-regression. This estimated the effect of a group of environmental factors on robust DEA estimates. The results showed the existence of a significant relationship between efficiency and all of the analyzed variables. We also considered the influence of the political sign of the governing party.