Economic efficiency of public secondary education expenditure: How different are developed and developing countries?

Abstract

This study measures the efficiency of public secondary education expenditure in 37 developing and developed countries using a two-step semi-parametric DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methodology. We first implement two cross-country frontier models for the 2012-2015 period: one using a physical input (i.e., teacher-pupil ratio) and one using monetary inputs (i.e., government and private expenditure per secondary student as a percentage of GDP). These results are corrected by the effects of GDP per capita and adult educational attainment as non-discretionary inputs. We obtain five important results: 1) developed and developing countries are similar in terms of the education production process due to the peers used in the non-parametric Este articulo fue recibido el 4 de mayo del 2017, evaluado el 15 de septiembre del 2017 y finalmente aceptado el 30 de noviembre del 2017.estimation of relative efficiency; 2) developing countries could increase their enrolment rates and PISA scores by approximately 22% and ...