While a voluminous empirical literature has investigated cost efficiency in local government, until recently no effort has been invested in decomposing municipal performance into its persistent efficiency and transient efficiency components. In this paper, we estimate persistent and transient cost efficiency that might be attributed to managerial and environmental factors in the Victorian state local government system in Australia using stochastic frontier analysis over the period from 2014/2015 to 2018/2019. In addition, we seek to contribute to the empirical literature on local government performance by estimating differences in cost efficiency between urban and rural councils and the relationship between the transient cost efficiency and the overall cost performance of Victorian local councils. We find that the overall cost efficiency (OCE) of local councils is highly correlated with transient (short term) cost efficiency and that urban councils are more cost-efficient than their rural counterparts. Various public policy implications are then considered.

A body of empirical literature exists which sets out how the accommodation industry performs across a range of locations. However, research on tourism regions in terms of its accommodation industry remains underdeveloped, especially in the Covid-19 pandemic when tourism faced unprecedented adversity and need to find a way to move forward. In an attempt to address this and take the Australian accommodation industry as a case study, this paper sought to investigate the efficiency of Australian tourism regions in the accommodation industry for the period of 2014/15–2017/18. The findings clearly showed that Australian tourism regions had seen significant growth in terms of their efficiency in the accommodation industry over the surveyed period. The Australian commercial large cities, namely Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and the Gold Coast, represent perhaps the best example, having obtained a higher efficiency than all other tourism regions. Exogenous factors, such as the occupancy rate, the average daily rate, the number of international visitors and the number of domestic visitors overnight were identified as influencing the technical efficiency score of tourism regions, with policy formulation and implementation identified as being key to improving the efficiency of the accommodation industry at the regional level for a post-Covid-19 exogenous factors period.

Government financial assistance (GFA) plays an important role in higher education to facilitate the process of teaching, learning and research of staff and students. However, very little is known about efficiency of using GFA in higher education. This paper aims to investigate efficiency of using GFA in Australian universities in the context of substantial variation in public funding distribution. The stochastic frontier input requirement model was developed to measure efficiency of using GFA for 2009–2016. The findings reveal that the overall efficiency of using GFA on average at 0.956, implying a high level of efficiency in using public funding. However, bigger is not better in the performance of universities through using GFA. In addition, contextual factors potentially influence temporary transient efficiency (0.974), other than long-term managerial efficiency (0.982) decomposed from the overall efficiency index of GFA. Some suggestions are made for more appropriate solutions to funding distribution in Australian universities.

The scholarly literature has shown that population growth affects not only local and national economies, but also the quality of community life. Using the most recent 2014/2015 to 2017/2018 local government satisfaction data, we empirically examine the impact of population growth on overall community satisfaction, as well as some other subdimensions of resident satisfaction, in the Victorian state local government system in Australia and then investigate the differential effects of population growth on community satisfaction in urban and regional councils. Our findings show that population growth negatively influenced overall community satisfaction and some other sub-dimensions of local resident satisfaction. Moreover, population growth generated greater dissatisfaction in regional councils compared to urban councils. We conclude by considering the public policy implications of these findings.