In this chapter by Janice Stein warns about the dangers of adopting a narrow conception of productivity and efficiency …. Building on her analysis in The Cult of Efficiency, she argues that the language of efficiency, understood narrowly as cost … efficiency or productivity of a public service requires a measurement of the value or utility generated by the service. However …

This paper studies the effect of public sector efficiency on firm productivity using data from more than 400,000 firms … across Italy's provinces. Exploiting the large heterogeneity in the efficiency of the public sector across Italian provinces … significantly reduces the labor productivity of private sector firms. The results suggest that raising public sector efficiency …

efficiency. In addition, the stochastic frontier model incorporates the more realistic non-neutral shifting production frontier …, as opposed to the commonly assumed Hicks-neutral production technology underlying a production function. …