Abstract
The South African local government sector has undergone changes in the post-apartheid era as policy makers have sought to improve basic services provided to disadvantaged local communities. While scholars have considered various dimensions of the reform program, little effort has been directed at evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency dimensions of the changes in service provision, with some notable exceptions (van der Westhuizen and Dollery, 2009; Krugell, et al., 2010). This article seeks to contribute to this literature by evaluating the efficiency with which municipalities have provided (Reconstruction and Development Program) RDP water, RDP sanitation RDP electricity and RDP refuse removal, using Data Envelopment Analysis techniques (DEA) applied to panel data from 2006/2007 to 2008/2009 for 231 local municipalities and 46 district municipalities.Keywords: Data warehousing, Systems thinking, Prescriptive theory, Descriptive theory, Interpretative research. Disciplines: Information technology, systems theory, data warehousing, hermeneutics
Highlights
Post-apartheid policy makers inherited a landscape characterised by extreme economic, spatial and social inequality between the different ethnic communities, which had been segregated into separate urban areas
This approach was followed by van der Westhuizen and Dollery (2009) who estimated the productive efficiency with which municipal councils provided electricity, domestic waste removal, sanitation and water in line through the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques applied to cross-sectional data covering the period 2006/2007 for local municipalities as well as district municipalities
Between 2006/2007 and 2008/2009 the mean technical efficiency estimate increased from 38.1% to 46.0%, while the median for technical efficiency increased from 27.7% to 33.3%
Summary
Post-apartheid policy makers inherited a landscape characterised by extreme economic, spatial and social inequality between the different ethnic communities, which had been segregated into separate urban areas. A second embryonic empirical approach has focused on the efficiency rather than the effectiveness with which South African local government has delivered basic services under the RDP framework This approach was followed by van der Westhuizen and Dollery (2009) who estimated the productive efficiency with which municipal councils provided electricity, domestic waste removal, sanitation and water in line through the RDP using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques applied to cross-sectional data covering the period 2006/2007 for local municipalities as well as district municipalities.
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