Relative efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education

Abstract

Governments of OECD countries are under pressure to improve public sector performance and at the same time to reduce the government expenditure. In the process of improvement of public sector performance it is necessary ensure the efficiency in the provision of education, at the same time, the countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money directed to them. This prompted us to implement the comparative study to assess the efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education in European countries in 2015. First we analyze the government expenditure based on the data published by International Monetary Fund (IMF). Second, we analyze the quality of education through the PISA indicators published by OECD. Then we apply the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to assess the relative efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education using output-oriented model under the assumption of variable return to scale. Based on the results could it be said that average efficiency was 0.955 which suggests that the efficiency in evaluated countries was relatively high.

Keywords

• European countries
• government expenditure on secondary education
• PISA indicator
• Data Envelopment Analysis