Efficiency Evaluation of Departments Providing Social Assistance Through Data Envelopment Analysis: The Case of Some Municipalities in the Valencian Community

Municipal social services remain among the least examined public functions in the local-government efficiency literature, owing to the scarcity of structured administrative data and the difficulty of measuring their outputs. Addressing that gap, this study provides the first Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-based efficiency assessment of municipal primary social-care departments in the Valencian Community (Spain), drawing on a purpose-built dataset that combines 2023 administrative survey, budgetary, and socio-demographic information. Its methodological contribution is an integrated evaluation architecture articulating well-established components—input-oriented DEA under variable and constant returns to scale, the Banker–Morey treatment of non-discretionary contextual variables across an exhaustive lattice of specifications, and a super-efficiency ranking—into a single design that disentangles managerial, scale, and environmental sources of inefficiency. Applied to 18 municipalities, the analysis detects substantial technical inefficiency but shows that much of it reflects scale constraints and structurally demanding socio-demographic environments rather than managerial underperformance; several municipalities with high social vulnerability and below-average income attain full efficiency once context is incorporated, while a small set of units emerges as consistent benchmarks. The architecture yields objective evidence for inter-municipal benchmarking, offers a replicable template for data-poor public services, and cautions against context-blind efficiency metrics in allocating social-policy resources.