ABSTRACT

Assessing the performance of government services is an important component of current managing for results strategies. A number of commonly used techniques for measuring performance and informing decision making in the public sector are discussed in this volume. In this chapter we attempt to expand the repertoire of available techniques by providing an introduction to data envelopment analysis (DEA), a powerful linear programming technique for assessing the efficiency of organizations or decision-making units (DMU) providing similar services. One of the advantages of DEA is that in assessing efficiency it also helps to determine the course of action the decision

units (Melao, 2005). DEA helps to determine the amount of resource conservation or output increase necessary for a program or unit to achieve managerial efficiency.