Abstract:

The analysis of the efficiency of the education system has been widely discussed in the literature (Cordero, Crespo & Pedraja, 2013). The publication of the Pisa Report makes it possible to analyze the determining factors of educational performance. In this sense, one of the tools applied in this field has been the frontier analysis through non-parametric methodologies (Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA) (Cordero, Pedraja & Jiménez, 2005; Cordero et al., 2013), which allows estimating the efficiency, as a ratio of inputs and outputs, of a unit of analysis (schools) in relation to the observed sample.

However, other issues are important to be considered to ensure the adequate management of the education system. The analysis of the cost on education is a key element to improve the quality of academic performance (Montes-Pineda and López, 2022). So, its allocation plays a central role in education policies. In this sense, public management demands efficiency in the use of scarce resources, even more in the current context of the global economic crisis (Pérez-López et al., 2015).

In this context, local governments, that are the closest administration to citizen, have to provide a set of public services to satisfy neighbours’ needs. Among these services, Spanish municipalities have competences to guarantee the schooling as well as the maintenance and proper functioning of education facilities.

Moreover, the management form of local government service delivery adopted can play a decisive role. In this sense, previous literature has studied which management form of local government service delivery provide the highest levels of efficiency (Pérez-López et al., 2015). Traditionally, the debate was focused on the opposition of public and private management forms (Simões et al., 2012, Suárez-Valera et al., 2017). However, new management forms have proliferated being the range of management forms very extensive. So public managers can choose from diverse alternatives, such as intermunicipal cooperation (Bel et al., 2014; Bel and Warner, 2015) that has become in a tool of reducing costs in the provision of municipal services (Mohr et al., 2010).

Therefore, it is vital to analyse the education cost efficiency of the local governments with the aim of improving the public management of this service. For this purpose, it is proposed to apply the order-m frontier analyses that allows us to control for the super-efficient observations and estimate more robust results, considering the education cost of local government as input and the PISA results for schooling in the municipality as outputs. The study is applied to the Spanish local government for the year 2018.

Keywords:

Efficiency, cost, education, local government.