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

This work investigates the Italian judicial system and discusses the designing of a policy reform to boost the efficiency of courts, considering the human resources available 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 computed 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 possible to improve the efficiency of judicial districts by working on judicial procedures. Hence, these are the domains where interventions by policy makers may prove successful. 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.