Efficiency in the Provision of Public Municipal Cultural Facilities

Recent years have seen a wealth of studies on Cultural Economics, in line with the importance of the economic performance of the public sector. In this context, the two-stage double bootstrap procedure of Simar and Wilson (2007) has been used to estimate the efficiency determinants of Spanish local entities in the management of culture oriented public infrastructures, given the limited financial resources available to these entities. The final sample comprises 1,159 municipalities. In the first stage, technical efficiency is estimated by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and, based on a truncated-regression, the resulting efficiency estimates are regressed on a group of 10 selected environmental variables in a second stage. We have also considered the influence of a dummy categorical variable -the political sign of the governing party- on the efficient provision of the facilities under study. The results show the existence of a significant relation between efficiency and all the variables except two: unemployment rate and political strength. Our results also show that municipalities governed by conservative parties are more efficient.