Public administration in the European Union is undergoing several reforms, as well as in Slovak Republic (SR), to make the public services more efficient. New Slovak building legislation introduced a new policy of state building authorities with retroactive transfer of building competences from self-government to the state. The aim of this paper is to evaluate two policies in the construction sector – the original and the new one and their efficiency. In the quantitative analysis current building authorities, exercising competences at municipalities, are compared with the simulated district building authorities, employing metafrontier approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis. Results of the analysis of the net effect of the two organizational forms on efficiency show that the potential district building authorities would be 56.5 percentage points less efficient than the current building authorities, in terms of Meta-Technology Ratio indicator. In the qualitative analysis, using guided interviews with mayors in two regions of the SR, we found out ambiguous opinion on the building competences transfer from municipalities to state authorities within the new state policy.
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