Efficiency Evaluation On Open Government Data Portals Based On DEA-Malmquist

Since the Open Government Data Portal of Shanghai came into service in 2012,more than 100 open government data portals in China has been online.The rapid development of open government data has also brought about many problems,such as the low level of openness and serious waste of resources.Efficiency evaluation on open government data portals will reveal the effectiveness of input-output transformation as well as promote healthy development of these portals.At present,many institutions and scholars at home and abroad have carried out a series of evaluation studies on the government data opening.Foreign evaluations mostly focus on the national and regional levels,while the domestic research objects are mainly provincial and municipal open government data portals that have been put into use.However,all provinces and cities are compared under a same evaluation framework,ignoring the differences among administrative levels and volumes of these governments.In addition,scholars at home and abroad mostly evaluate the opening of government data from the perspective of effectiveness using static data.In view of this,this study evaluates open government data portals from the perspective of efficiency,analyzes the change of each portal's efficiency over a few months and evaluates the dynamic development of these portals.Based on a large number of domestic and foreign literatures,this study establishes the input-output evaluation system according to practical situations of China's open government data portals.And then taking 29 portals for example,this study crawled the open data of totally 15 months from July 2018 to September 2019.The data envelopment analysis method(DEA)and Malmquist index are combined to analyze the technical efficiency,pure technical efficiency,scale efficiency and changes of efficiency of all the portals during the 15 months.Furthermore,The Malmquist index can further decompose the total factor productivity index to reveal the reasons for the changes.The study reveals that during the 15-month of observation,the efficiency of open government data portals as a whole is non-DEA effective(the average efficiency is 0.835),while refers to the Malmquist total factor productivity index,the average efficiency of all the portals is increasing by 1.9%,which shows that the development of open government data portals is generally in a good trend and the efficiency level is improving.Taking the latest data of September 2019 as an example,this study carries out an efficiency improvement analysis of non-DEA effective portals,and the results shows that average user access to data sets is insufficient,leading to an insufficient output.In other word,open government data needs to be exposed to the public and society more and more.The contribution of this research lies in the establishment of an input-output evaluation index system of government data opening from the perspective of efficiency,which can also guarantee the objectivity of the evaluation results for all those data are obtained directly from the portals.In addition,this study dynamically evaluates the development of 29 typical open government data portals in China,which can be used as a supplement to traditional static analysis,and suggestions for better development of the portals can be proposed according to the results.