While local government by the people is becoming to stay, most of them are placed m conditions to cope with local residents' expectations and demands on increasing administrative services by managing existent problems efficiently and effectively even with their financial limits. To tide over these difficult situations, local governments are becoming aware of me concept of productivity and are going ahead with several reformations and structural reforms correspondent to increase their administrative productivity. The maximization of productivity, however, can be possible only with a rational plan by examining and estimating the productivity of the local governments more accurately. Therefore, with this situation, this study is performed for me purpose m analyse theoretically and to study positively the relative productivity of local governments.
To begin with, to achieve the purpose of the theoretical analysis, this dissertation reviews some discussions about the productivity and the methods of measuring it. In discussions abut the productivity, an idea of the productivity of local governments is defined as operating relative efficiencies. Particularly, it indicates the tendency of pursuing the productivity in local governments with various subject matters on an administrative reform of the new public management. And this dissertation emphasizes the necessity of measuring the relative productivity on the basis of it. Also, this dissertation presents that the productivity of local governments is influenced by the in-and-outside environmental factors and presents the method of study on the productivity with efficiency, effectiveness, and a unitive approaching method, which is never discussed before.
In discussions about measuring the productivity, this dissertation points out to consider a rate of service units per input unit. And from this, the basic model and usefulness of DEA(Data Envelopment Analysis), the measuring method of this study, and matters to be attended to is observed. DEA is applied to this empirical study because it does not need information of price, as well as it offers the improvement on useful information of management to an inefficient organization unit for benchmarking an efficient organization by presenting a standard group.
Next, to achieve the purpose of the positive study, me relative productivity of local governments in 85 counties is measured in classification into technology, distribution, cost, and scale efficiency. And with these 4 different types of efficiencies, differences in quality and decisive factors of productivity, and me way of improvement are deduced. First, in the conclusion of measuring the efficiency of local governments in four sides, each efficiency coefficient is divided local governments into top, middle, and bottom. And the empirical evidence of this study shows that differences of each efficiency can be existed regionally. Second, related to the decisive factor of productivity, the empirical analysis of this dissertation shows that the socio-economic variable and each efficiency coefficient, annual expenditure and number of public service personnel as the input factor, and population and financial independency level as the socio-economic variable have an effect on the productivity of local governments, while the output factors do not.
Third, decisive factors of the productivity are financial independency level, number of public service personnel per person, a rate of manufacturer, population, and jurisdiction area per public service personnel, except the amount of expenditure per person, population density, and personnel expenses. These factors related to each other closely decide the technology, distribution, cost, and scale efficiency. On the other hand, based on improved method of the efficiency in four sides, it is presented expansion strategies of local finance in the efficiency of technology, definiteness in the way of functional accomplishment by analysing the budget of local governments exactly in the efficiency of distribution, reshuffle of administrative organization and staff in the efficiency of cost, and the necessity of reorganizing administrative districts in the efficiency of scale.
With these empirical results, this study signifies to confirm the general possibility of applying DEA to measure the relative productivity on public services of local governments. Also, this dissertation provides several empirical evidences to objectify the measurement of the relative productivity out of applying the technology, distribution, cost, and scale efficiency cases on public services. In spite of these analytical and policy contributions, this dissertation has a lot of limits to generalize the results in valuing this study, methodology, and the data. However, it may contribute to the improvement of the productivity of local governments with future positive studies of measuring relative productivity and building performance indexes of public services produced by local governments.