# Role of Public Entities in Suitable Provision of Public Services: Case Study from Slovakia
## 3 Materials and Methods  
The aim of the paper is to characterize the transfer of competencies and their financing from state administration to local government using the example of registry offices in the Slovak Republic. With the transition of the Slovak Republic from a command economy to a market economy, not only did the economy change, but the transition also required changes in the management of public administration. The central model of public administration, which was applied in Slovakia until 1989, was characterized by its centralism and bureaucracy, which essentially copied the then management of the country's economy. Public administration reform began in 1990 and is ongoing. In 1990, the self-governing position of municipalities was restored with the adoption of Act No. 369/1990 Coll. on the municipal establishment, and public administration as a whole moved from a centrally managed model to a dual model. In the second stage of the reform (in the period 1995-1996), regional self-government was to be created, and at the same time, the decentralization of public administration was to begin. However, regional self-government, as well as the decentralization of public administration, did not take place until 2002. The registry offices were the first area of competence acquired by local government. In addition, fiscal decentralization took place in 2005, which significantly changed the financing of local and regional government in relation to the state. For this reason, information on the financing of devolored competencies became fully available at the level of individual regions only in 2007. Therefore, we evaluate the financing of this competence from 2007 to 2018 at the level of individual regions of the Slovak Republic using cumulative data from all the registry offices in the Slovak republic. The database was obtained from the Ministry of the Interior of the Slovak Republic. In connection with the aim of the article, we sought to find an answer to the question of whether there are regional differences in the performance of registry activities. The registries were the first public service acquired by local governments in the process of decentralization of public administration in the Slovak Republic. In this context, we examined the following four hypotheses:  
**Hypothesis 1 (H1). **_We predict that with increasing number of inhabitants of individual regions of the Slovak Republic, the number of operations carried out by registry offices in these regions will increase at a statistically significant level._  
**Hypothesis 2 (H2). **_We predict that with increasing number of operations carried out by registry offices in individual regions of the Slovak Republic, the volume of subsidies in these regions will increase at a statistically significant level._  
**Hypothesis 3 (H3). **_We predict statistically significant differences between individual regions of the Slovak Republic in terms of the number of actions per capita._  
**Hypothesis 4 (H4). **_We predict statistically significant differences between individual regions of the Slovak Republic in terms of the total subsidy allocated to registry offices per capita._  
Several mathematical-statistical methods were used to test the above hypotheses. Individual analyzes were processed in MS Office, Statistica 13.4, and Statgraphics XVIII. We used the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (hereinafter \"Kendall coefficient\"), which is calculated as follows:  
\[r_{K}=\frac{n_{c}-n_{d}}{n(n-1)/2}\]  
where:  
\(n\)--number of observations  
\(n_{c}\)--number of concordant pairs  
\(n_{d}\)--number of discordant pairs. The difference between regions was evaluated using Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance. \[Q=\frac{12}{n(n-1)}\sum_{i=1}^{I}\frac{T_{i}^{2}}{n_{i}}-3(n+1)\]  
where:  
\(n\)--number of observations  
\(n_{i}\)--number of observations in \(i\)-th group  
\(T_{i}^{2}\)--total number of orders of \(i\)-th group. The difference between regions was evaluated using Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance.