Radial measures of public services deficit for regional allocation of public funds

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. The proposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget restrictions and equality of access for equal need criteria (equity-based notion of regional needs). The construction of non-parametric deficit indicators is proposed for public service availability by a novel application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models, whose results offer advantages for the evaluation and improvement of decentralised public resource allocation systems. The method introduced in this paper has relevance as a resource allocation guide for the majority of services centrally funded by the public sector in a given country, such as health care, basic and higher education, citizen safety, justice, transportation, environmental protection, leisure, culture, housing and city planning, etc.