Data envelopment analysis to investigate the Italian legal system and its reform

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Greta Falavigna,Roberto Ippoliti
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2877

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Data envelopment analysis to investigate the Italian legal

system and its reform

Greta Falavigna

1

| Roberto Ippoliti

1,2

1

Research Institute on Sustainable Economic

Growth (IRCrES), National Research Council of

Italy (CNR), Torino, Italy

2

Faculty of Business Administration and

Economics, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld,

Germany

Correspondence

Roberto Ippoliti, Faculty of Business

Administration and Economics, Bielefeld

University, Bielefeld, Germany.

Email: roberto.ippoliti@uni-bielefeld.de

This work investigates the Italian judicial system and discusses the designing of a pol-

icy reform to boost the efficiency of courts, considering the human resources avail-

able as well as the expenditure generated by the process to deliver justice. The

authors present the benchmarks and shed light on how policy makers embarking on

such a process of reform may be misled by inappropriate model definition. In detail,

the authors propose a comparative analysis of technical efficiency (TE) scores com-

puted using data envelopment analysis, adopting the same output (number of settled

cases) and two alternative sets of inputs (judicial expenditure and human resources).

According to the results, without considering the information extracted from the two

complementary benchmark analyses, policy makers might be misled in the reform

process. Regarding the elements that affect the performance of courts, it may be pos-

sible to improve the efficiency of judicial districts by working on judicial procedures.

Hence, these are the domains where interventions by policy makers may prove suc-

cessful. As for policy implications, the models and benchmarks presented here could

be used to devise a reform of the judicial system aimed at enhancing its TE, while also

keeping public expenditure under control.

KEYWORDS

court, data envelopment analysis, judicial efficiency, judicial geography, legal environment,

policy reform

1|INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the worldwide financial crisis has caused the public

debt of countries to rise (Woo & Kumar, 2015), which is likely to

affect welfare and economic growth over time (Checherita-

Westphal & Rother, 2012; Chudik et al., 2017), along with the

intertemporal transfer of income, creating disagreements about fiscal

policies among generations (Arai et al., 2018; Barseghyan &

Battaglini, 2016; Müller et al., 2016). To alleviate such consequences

and ensure fiscal sustainability, the member states of the European

Union (EU) introduced fiscal regulations to curb their debt, that is, the

Maastricht Treaty convergence criteria, which aimed to keep public

debt within 60% of GDP and government deficit within 3% of GDP

(De Grauwe, 1996). Accordingly, a number of EU countries implemen-

ted public system reforms to gather additional resources that could be

used to reduce the social impact of the crisis. Among them, Italy

makes for a particularly engaging case study since, due to its very high

public debt, fundamental structural reforms are needed not only for

the sake of debt reduction but also to ensure sufficient resources for

welfare expenditure. Yet, which should be the key criteria to be

applied to steer the country's reforms?

It is the policy makers' responsibility to determine the root causes

of inefficiency and the principles underpinning any process of re-

organization. To reach these targets, practitioners might pursue a

bottom-up approach, asking not only operators but also end users to

identify the procedures to be changed and the actions needed to

Received: 24 November 2022 Revised: 29 March 2023 Accepted: 12 June 2023

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2877

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2023 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Public Affairs. 2023;23:e2877. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of15

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2877