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EVALUATING GAINS FROM MERGERS IN A NON‐PARAMETRIC PUBLIC GOOD MODEL OF POLICE SERVICES
Author(s) -
SIMPER Richard,
WEYMANJONES Thomas
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
annals of public and cooperative economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.526
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-8292
pISSN - 1370-4788
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8292.2007.00350.x
Subject(s) - welsh , merge (version control) , business , government (linguistics) , service (business) , public administration , public relations , marketing , political science , computer science , geography , linguistics , philosophy , archaeology , information retrieval
** : The merger of police services in the UK has been suggested on the grounds that efficiency improvements will be possible. This paper applies a public good model of the police service to evaluate the potential efficiency gains from mergers of police services in England and Wales. It uses a non‐parametric method suggested by Bogetoft and Wang (2005) . We construct a dataset that reflects the public good nature of police service and allows for the exogenous imposition by government on the level of police service budgets. Our main finding is that English and Welsh police service mergers could lead to increases in police staff resource efficiencies between 10 per cent and 70 per cent. Hence, we confirm the government's decision to merge English and Welsh police services.