Conference theme: “Governance and efficiency assessment of public
services”
The primary role of national and local
governments as leading agents for the provision of public services has gained
increased attention as a result of the economic challenges resulting from the
economic downturn that hit most countries after 2008, and that materialized in
economic reforms that condition the funding and performance evaluation of
public services.
In parallel, scholars and policy observers have
fueled the debate on what elements form the objective function of public
service providers as well as on how to model the technology of public services
for performance evaluation purposes. These concerns have become evident in the
approach adopted by many academic studies dealing with efficiency assessments
in a number of public services, including among others higher education (e.g.,
Agasisti and Pérez-Esparrells, 2010; De Witte et al., 2013; Berbegal-Mirabent et al., 2013; Johnes et al., 2017; Lafuente and Berbegal-Mirabent, 2017),
health care (e.g., Hollingsworth, 2008; Gok and Sezen, 2013; Du et al., 2014; Büchneret al., 2016), public libraries (De Witte and Geys, 2013, 2011) and the functioning of local governments (e.g., Balaguer-Coll etal., 2013; Pérez-López et al., 2015; Kim and Warner, 2016; Narbon and De Witte, 2018a, 2018b).
Because of the relevance of the efficiency
analysis of public services and institutions for academics and policy makers,
we encourage participants to develop research that challenges canonical
analyses by proposing relevant research questions, and by adopting critical
perspectives that seek to shed valuable insights on the efficiency of public
service providers.
The purpose of the Workshop is to focus on
specific challenges around measuring performance in the education, health and
other public services sectors. It will bring together scholars from various
disciplines and fields to debate the present and future challenges in the area
of public sector efficiency, performance measurement, and policy and managerial
implications of the on-going research. The Workshop provides an
ideal platform for
presenting new methods,
applications of existing
techniques, and advances in theoretical and empirical research.
The 2019 Workshop on “The governance and efficiency of public services” explicitly seeks
to advance the efficiency evaluation of public sectors from a theoretical and
empirical perspective. In our view, our research efforts can contribute to
fertilize the debate on the efficiency assessment of public sectors, while
promoting theory-led models that permit to improve the modeling of the
production function of public service providers. Obviously, we believe that the
outcomes of this Workshop are of great interest not only to the academic
community, but also to policy makers and business circles connected with the
public administration.
Important dates
May 3rd
|
Deadline for
abstract submission
|
May 31st
|
Notification of
acceptance
|
June 28th
|
Full paper
submission (not mandatory)
|
July 5th
|
Deadline for early
bird registration and fee payment
|
July 31st
|
Deadline for late
registration and fee payment
|
September 5th
& 6th
|
Workshop
|
Submission guidelines
Extended abstracts (max 3/4 pages) or full
papers must be submitted by email to workshopefficiency@uic.es by
May 3rd, 2019, and notification of acceptance will be sent out by
May 31st, 2019.
Prospective participants can also propose not
only single papers, but also entire sessions, that can share thematic interests
or methodological commonalities. In this case, please indicate the name of the
Chair responsible for organizing the session.
Best paper award
All Workshop participants can participate for
the best paper awards. To participate, authors must submit the full paper
(abstracts not accepted) by June 28th, 2019.