The Efficiency of Public Spending on Education: an empirical comparison of EU countries

Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of ‘efficiency’ and ‘equity’ in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted to them. In this article, an empirical study compares the spending efficiency on education in 20 European countries during the period 2006–2009. OECD-PISA test scores are used as output, while the ‘expenditure per student’ is used as input. The efficiency scores are calculated via a bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In a second stage, the efficiency scores are regressed against a set of context variables which represent the different socio-economic settings (e.g. GDP per capita, unemployment rate, etc.) as well as some important ‘structural’ characteristics of the educational systems. Teachers' salaries and Internet use (as a proxy for technological ‘literacy’) play a positive role in affecting educational performance, while GDPpc is negatively related to efficiency. Lastly, Malmquist indexes are calculated to measure the change in efficiency in the period 2006–2009. The results showed that the average efficiency remained basically stable in the period.     

The Impact of the Bologna Reform on the Productivity of Swiss Universities

The Bologna reform aims to enhance several dimensions of the universities' activities, by favouring mobility and mutual recognition of higher education degrees across Europe, with the objective to create a European Higher Education Area. The radical changes induced by the Bologna Process affect universities' productivity both directly (for example, implementation costs, curriculum streamlining, evaluation intensity) and indirectly (for example, the ability to attract more students and higher levels of competition among institutions). The decentralised organisation of the Swiss university sector provides an ideal setting to test this hypothesis, as the panel data of departments permits the consideration of the unobserved heterogeneity across both universities and scientific fields. The empirical results support the claim that the Bologna reform enhances university productivity. Furthermore, there is no evidence of substantial costs of the system transformation.