Efficiency of Counties in Eastern Croatia: Applications of Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper identifies and analyses the applications of the leading nonparametric methodology, namely the Data Envelopment Analysis (hereafter DEA) in the investigation of the efficiency of Croatian counties. This article aims to present the findings regarding the efficiency and performance of Eastern Croatian counties (which are Osijek – Baranja, Brod – Posavina, Virovitica – Podravina, Požega – Slavonia and Vukovar – Sirmium) as well as their comparison to the other Croatian counties. Other goals of this article are to present and provide a theoretical background to the DEA methodology as one of the most popular techniques in efficiency evaluation since its introduction in 1978 by Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes. This article implements an in-depth extensive literature review of studies implementing the DEA methodology in efficiency evaluation of Croatian counties. The conducted literature review has explored the Scopus, WoS (SSCI and SCI papers) and CROSBI (Croatian Scientific Bibliography) databases using „Croatia“, „County“ and „Data Envelopment Analysis“ as keywords for the search. This approach resulted in 7 hits in Scopus, 15 on WoS and 11 on CROSBI, which eventually resulted in the analysis of a total of 12 papers. This study identifies all the previous work regarding the efficiency of Eastern Croatia counties as well as an analysis of their used models, the variable set and their findings. The findings reveal different aspects of efficiency evaluation of Croatian counties with a special focus on counties in Eastern Croatia. This literature review indicates that most of the analysed studies have been published after the year 2010 but have included the time frame from the year 2000 onwards for the efficiency analysis. The longest study includes 14 years, whereas the shortest includes 1 analysed year. This article could serve as an incentive for greater use of the DEA methodology as a very suitable tool for efficiency and performance evaluation as well as a benchmarking tool in different industries.