Efficiency in school education: a semi-parametric study of shool efficiency in OECD countries

• Autor(a) principal: Lima, Gonçalo da Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/16122
• topic: School efficiency; OECD; Free disposal hull estimator; Partial frontiers analysis; Economia da educação; Política de educação; Estudo de eficiência; Avaliação do sistema educativo; Qualidade do ensino; PISA Program for International Student Assessment - 2015; Países OCDE

Efciency-driven reforms have become increasingly relevant in education policy, as education systems face tighter budget constraints. Educational authorities around the world often struggle to foster the best student outcomes out of the set of available school resources. This dissertation aims to contribute to this debate by using a semi-parametric approach to evaluate the efciency across 34 OECD countries, using data from PISA 2015. The estimation of the education production possibilities frontier is made through a free disposal hull (FDH) method, a non-convex and non-parametric estimator, also extending the analysis to incorporate recently developed partial frontier methods (order-m and order-x).According to the different specifications, ineficient schools could have increased average student achievement between 9%-18%, for the same level of human and material resources, and given the socio-economic characteristics of their students. Differences in eficiency scores are also investigated. The results suggest that schools that enrol a larger number of students and where the principal can decide on budget allocations are more eficient. On the other hand, schools with high concentration of students from immigrant backgrounds and more repeaters are hindered in the provision of eficient allocations of school resources. Finally, no necessary trade-off is found between efciency and equity in the provision of quality education.