Comparative performance of Algeria's education districts: The Influence of colonial legacy through cultural capital

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the comparative performance of Algeria's education districts using a two-stage DEA methodology. Modeling their functioning as non-homogeneous parallel sub-unit production systems, districts are considered Decision-Making Units with three educational subunits. This type of modeling provides an overall regional efficiency analysis of the entire education sector. Furthermore, the current research links early colonial policy of educational discrimination across regions to present-day regional educational performance. The main DEA-like model evaluates the average overall efficiency at 74.5% and identifies no efficient district while the standard DEA overestimates this average by 20.8% and identifies five efficient districts with no efficient subunits. Moreover, IV truncated regression estimates the impact of one standard deviation increase in cultural capital to be a 0.81 standard deviation increase in the efficiency score with a 95% bootstrap percentile confidence interval covering estimations of all alternative methods. The findings confirm that history matters and seem to fit the narrative of the link between colonial legacy and present-day educational performance through the cultural capital transmission channel.