Decision-making tools for public productivity improvement: A comparison of DEA to cost-benefit and regression analyses

The long tradition in the public sector of introducing decision-making tools that then fail to live up to expectations has fueled a debate over the proper role of government. This paper suggests that the debate over government productivity may be misplaced. Public productivity may be hindered as a result of inappropriate use of decision-making tools for the allocation of resources. Thus, this paper argues for an enlarged repertoire of decision-making techniques. In particular, data envelopment analysis is presented as an alternative often more appropriate than such commonly used techniques as cost–benefit ratio and regression analyses.