Beata Gavurova

Department of Banking and Investment, Technical University of Kosice
Slovakia
Email: beata.gavurova@tuke.sk

Relative efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education

Kristina Kocisova

Department of Banking and Investment, Technical University of Kosice
Slovakia
Email: kristina.kocisova@tuke.sk

Lubomir Belas

Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Prešov in Prešov,
Slovakia
Email: lubomir.belas@unipo.sk

Vladimir Krajcik

Department of Applied Informatics, University of Entrepreneurship and Law,
Czech Republic
Email: vladimir.krajcik@vspp.cz

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.

Received: December, 2016

1st Revision: May, 2017

Accepted: May, 2017

DOI: 10.14254/2071-8330.2017/10-2/23

JEL Classification:  I21, C14

Keywords: European countries, government expenditure on secondary education, PISA indicator, Data Envelopment Analysis