Abstract:

Within the educational system, universities are one of the most important public institutions, given the multidimensionality of their activity since they are creators and disseminators of knowledge through their research, teaching and transfer activities (Sierra et al., 2009, García -Aracil, 2013). Likewise, they manage a significant volume of financial resources and have many employees of very diverse categories. Additionally, the Higher Education System (HES) is characterized by high competitiveness both in attracting students and talent, as well as in obtaining financial resources.

This is why the analysis of the efficiency of university systems is taking on special relevance (Clarke et al., 2018). In this sense, several works have tried to analyze both the efficiency levels of universities in different countries around the world, as well as their evolution and the economies of scale of the university system (Zafra-Gómez et al., 2023). However, in this work the analysis of the efficiency of HES is proposed considering a new perspective: the efficiency of research spending in the Spanish university system. Investment in R&D&I in Spain is lower than the EU-28 average (MINECO, 2016), although it is true that the part allocated to Spanish higher education institutions is above the European average (Michavila et al., 2015).

Concretely, state research plans are a mechanism of the Spanish Government for financing R&D&I and they are executed through competitive calls. Thus, the different types of research centers attract funding that affects research activities, thereby making available R&D&I spending data to be able to analyze the efficiency of research plans in the Spanish HES.

Within the techniques for measuring the efficiency of the educational system, one of the most widely applied tools are non-parametric methodologies (Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA) (Cordero, Pedraja and Jiménez, 2005; Cordero et al., 2013), which allows estimating the efficiency of a unit of analysis in relation to the observed sample, as a ratio of inputs and outputs. In this context, we proposed the use of the Malmquist Index (IM) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to analyze the efficiency of the research plans of the Spanish HES during the period 2013-2020, to study technological change.

Of the total of 93 Spanish universities, we have a sample of 79 public and private universities. The study is carried out for the 2013-2016 and 2017-2020 research plans. For the efficiency analysis, the funding received annually by each university through the research plans mentioned above is taken as input and as outputs the total number of annual publications in the WoS, total number of publications in the first quartile, citations received and number of patents.

This work proposes a new perspective on the analysis of the efficiency of the university system its objective is focused on analyzing the efficiency and technological change of the research plans received by Spanish universities in the periods 2013-2016 and 2017-2020. Our results corroborate that there is a significant improvement in the second of the periods analyzed and that this improvement is based on the improvement of technological change. On the other hand, some universities find it difficult to achieve improvements such as those obtained by universities that represent best practices.

Keywords:

Higher education system, technological change, efficiency, research funding.