Measuring the efficient management of public works contracts: a non-parametric approach

The efficiency of execution of public works contracts is usuallydefined in terms of the capacity to complete works within the costs and thetime agreed on in the contract. Therefore, it has been traditionally measuredconsidering either costs overruns or delays. Our purpose is to consider bothmeasures simultaneously, so as to develop a measure of overall efficiency ofpublic works contracts execution. We compute this measure, through abenchmark procedure, using a non-parametric approach (DEA - DataEnvelopment Analysis). The analysis is carried out employing a detailed dataset of Italian public contracts for roads and highways, in the period 2000-2005.