Efficiency in provision of public dental services in Norway

The paper examines productivity in the provision of public dental services in Norway. The main responsibility of the public dental services is to provide care for all children up to 18 years of age. Most dental care is provided by public dental officers. Productivity was measured by estimating a stochastic production frontier from input and output data from the public dental service in Norway. The results indicate that there are increasing returns to scale. Our measure of technical efficiency showed that the level of inefficiency is fairly small. However, the inefficiency is greater when estimated from a deterministic production frontier rather than from a stochastic frontier. One limitation of the present methodology is that it does not say anything about the level of efficiency in the Norwegian public dental service in absolute terms. A greater level of inefficiency would have been identified if a few counties had performed clearly better than the rest.