Abstract
Analysis of technical efficiency is an important tool in management of public libraries. We assess the efficiency of 4660 public municipal libraries in the Czech Republic in the year 2017. For this purpose, we utilize data envelopment analysis (DEA) based on the Chebyshev distance. We consider total expenditures, employees and book collection as inputs with registrations, book circulation, event attendance and collection additions as outputs. We pay special attention to the operating environment and find that the efficiency scores significantly depend on the population of the municipality and its distance to the municipality with extended powers. To remove the effect of the operating environment, we perform DEA separately for categories based on decision tree analysis as well as categories designed by an expert.
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Notes
The Czech Republic is divided into 8 cohesion regions (NUTS 2—region soudržnosti), 14 regions (NUTS 3—kraj), 77 districts (LAU 1—okres), 206 municipalities with extended powers (obec s rozšířenou působností), 393 municipalities with authorized municipal office (obec s pověřeným obecním úřadem) and 6258 municipalities (LAU 2 – obec) as of April 1, 2019.
We have also considered different specifications of distance and reference town. Instead of the travel time, we have tried the air distance and road distance. Instead of the municipality with extended powers (obec s rozšířenou působností), we have tried the district capital (LAU 1—okresní město), regional capital (NUTS 3—krajské město), town with population higher than 10,000 and city with general significance. All combinations of distances and reference towns have lead to weaker results.
Before arriving at this final model, we have tried several specifications of the regression model including all variables \(p_i\), \(d_i\) and \(t_i\) with logarithmic and power transformations as well as various interactions.
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Acknowledgements
The work on this paper was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic under Grant TL01000463 in the Eta program. The author would like to thank Jan Kubát for his help with data preparation and Bojka Hamerníková, Vladimír Beneš and Marek Jetmar for their comments.
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Holý, V. The impact of operating environment on efficiency of public libraries. Cent Eur J Oper Res 30, 395–414 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-020-00696-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10100-020-00696-4