The performance of local tax offices of Norway is studied over a three-year period applying Data Envelopment Efficiency analysis and a Malmquist productivity index. The estimates are bias-corrected using a bootstrap approach recently developed for DEA models. The results show that bias...

Previous studies indicate that Finnish hospitals have significantly higher productivity than in the other Nordic countries. We decompose the productivity levels into technical efficiency, scale efficiency and country specific possibility sets (technical frontiers). Data have been collected on...

This article focuses on describing the methodological challenges intrinsic in international comparative studies of hospital productivity and how these challenges have been addressed within the context of hospital comparisons in the Nordic countries. The hospital sectors in the Nordic countries...

Efficiency analyses in the health care sector are often criticised for not incorporating quality variables. The definition of quality of primary health care has many aspects, and it is inevitably also a question of the patients’ perception of the services received. This paper uses variables...

In a period where decentralisation seemed to be the prominent trend, Norway in 2002 chose to re-centralise the hospital sector. The reform had three main aims; cost control, efficiency and reduced waiting times. This study investigates whether the hospital reform has improved hospital...

Research on productive efficiency at the firm level has developed as an important and active strand of research the last decades, both within operations research, management science and economics. However, the interests pursued within the fields have had some differences regarding sound...