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Country Input oriented Output oriented

VRS TE Rank VRS TE Rank

CRS TE

South Africa 0.676 7 0.529 20 0.421
Thailand 1.000 1 1.000 1 0.822
Turkey 0.416 17 0.482 24 0.236
Average 0.548 0.671 0.422
Minimum 0.355 0.482 0.219
Standard dev. 0.186 0.144 0.186
CRS TE – constant returns to scale technical efficiency.
VRS TE – variable returns to scale technical efficiency.

Figure 6 presents the theoretical production possibility frontier associated with the aforementioned set of
DEA results. It shows how far the distance is between the bulk of countries and the most efficient ones.
Nevertheless, there are still very marked differences between the top, medium and bottom performers
inside the production possibility frontier. To get a clearer picture of differences when abstracting from
the best performer we treat Singapore as an “outlier” and recalculate the DEA without it.

Figure 6 – Theoretical production possibility frontier: one input, one output

LVA CZ E

ML T

ZAF

TUR

BRA

THA

SGP

IRL

CY P

PRT

GRC

KOR

MUS

ROM BGR

LTU POL

SV N

EST SV K HUN

MEX

CHL

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

1.10

1.20

1.30

1.40

1.50

1.60

0.0 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0

Total spending-to-GDP ratio (%)

PSP indicator

BGR – Bulgaria; BRA – Brazil; CHL – Chile; CYP – Cyprus; CZE – Czech Republic; EST – Estonia; GRC – Greece; HUN – Hungary; IRL – Ireland;
KOR – Korea; LTU – Lithuania; LVA – Latvia; MEX – Mexico; MLT – Malta; MUS – Mauritius; POL – Poland; PRT – Portugal; ROM – Romania;
SGP – Singapore; SVK - Slovak Republic; SVN – Slovenia; THA – Thailand; TUR – Turkey; ZAF – South Africa.

When recomputing the DEA scores in a one input and one output framework without Singapore, the
results are somewhat less dramatic and make more countries “feel good” about their public sector (see
Table 5 and Figure 7). The corresponding theoretical production possibility frontier now includes
Thailand and Cyprus while Korea and Ireland are almost on the frontier. These countries’ efficiency
scores are equal to, or very close to, unity while they ranged from 0.49 to 0.87 before (except Thailand
which was also at unity). New EU member states are spread over ranks 1 to 24 (input scores) and 1 to 18
(output scores), respectively.