Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate the perceived downward accountability and transparency of two public services – water supply and sewage and local road maintenance – in the Sarajevo Canton in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).Design/Methodology/Approach: An opinion survey[1] on a sample of 250 respondents and four binomial regressions were conducted to measure the factors that affect the perceived downward accountability and transparency of the two public services.Findings: The results of binomial logit regressions indicate that in terms of perceived accountability and transparency of water supply and sewage, significant variables include gender, education, and satisfaction with the price the respondents pay for such service. Significant variables for perceived local road maintenance accountability include satisfaction with regular and winter local road maintenance, while for perceived transparency an additional significant variable is education.Academic contribution to the field: Although publications and literature dealing with the implementation of New Public Management in developed countries are plentiful, this is not the case in transition countries. The paper examines the case of the Sarajevo Canton and contributes to the research of perceived downward accountability and transparency. It may serve as a basis for further studies on public sector management in other local communities or small transition countries.Originality/Value: The paper contributes to the limited empirical literature regarding the perceived accountability and transparency and suggests ways to improve such.  

Abstract The significance and methods of measuring inefficiency of local communities has been gaining prominence in the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the level of technical inefficiency in the sample of local communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the year of 2017. We implement parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to conduct an input-oriented stochastic parametric approach to measuring technical inefficiency of local communities in BiH. The results of our work are complementary to previous research indicating relative technical inefficiency of local communities in BiH. On average, BiH local communities’ total expenditures can be reduced by 46.8 percent without reducing output levels to achieve the result of the local community on the best practice frontier. Since our analysis and selection of variables are driven by data availability, the future research plans to include more variables.

Abstract This paper analyses the inefficiency of social services targeting in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FB&H). Using official statistics microdata of the Household Budget Survey 2015, three models of social minimum in FB&H were constructed: extreme and general poverty, and the model with multidimensional poverty aspects. The analysis of features of poor household categories showed that the most vulnerable residents of FB&H are not beneficiaries of permanent financial assistance. The reason for such an inefficient targeting was recognized in the Federal Law on Principles of Social Care, Care for the War-Disabled Civilians and Care for Families with Children that stipulates that only persons and families that (cumulatively): are incapable for work, have insufficient income, and there are no family members who are legally obligated to support them. The results indicated a high inconsistency in the legal criteria for qualification, and also in the amounts of permanent social assistance among cantons. The Proxy Means Test (PMT) Model is offered as one of the possible solutions for the improvement of social services targeting in FB&H. Given the importance of efficiency of targeting in social services, the research results could be useful, for both, vulnerable segments of the society and federal and cantonal ministries of labour and social affairs, in the process of targeting the households qualified for social support programmes.

We derive closed formula for the heat kernel $K_\mathbb{H}$ associated to Maass-Laplacian operator $D_k$ for any real $k$ and prove that heat kernel $K_\mathbb{H}$ is strictly monotone decreasing function. We also derive some important asymptotic formulae for the heat kernel $K_\mathbb{H}$.