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Municipalities’ willingness to adopt process innovations: evidence for higher cost-efficiency
Publikationstyp
Review Article
Date Issued
2017-09-03
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Institut
TORE-URI
Journal
Start Page
707
End Page
730
Citation
Local Government Studies 5 (43): 707-730 (2017-09-03)
Publisher DOI
Scopus ID
In the public sector, innovation is understood as a major driver of public service performance improvement and excellence. On the one hand, previous research has proven a positive effect of innovation adoption on performance in the public sector. On the other hand, a broad literature proves positive effects of innovation antecedents on innovation adoption. This study bridges this gap and analyses the effect of an innovation antecedent–willingness to adopt a process innovation (accrual accounting)–on municipalities’ service provision cost-efficiency. Therefore, the author makes use of a panel data set of German municipalities, located in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Evidence shows that a higher municipal willingness to innovate relates to higher cost-efficiency. A higher innovation willingness might have a maximal effect of 17 percentage points on municipality cost-efficiency.
Subjects
local government
performance measurement
Process innovation willingness
stochastic frontier analysis