Abstract:

The scarcity of public resources makes it necessary to allocate the resources available in the most efficient way, and public administrations, specifically, universities are not an exception (López-Torres & Prior, 2020; Agasisti et al., 2021; Zafra-Gómez et al., 2023). Universities are creators and disseminators of knowledge through their research, teaching and transfer activities, and they also manage an important volume of economic resources and have a large number of employees of very diverse categories. Most of Spain's universities are publicly owned, so attention must be taken to ensure that citizens' resources are invested efficiently. This is why the analysis of the efficiency of university systems is taking on special relevance (Clarke et al., 2018).

Along with the determination of efficiency in recent times, citizens' demand for information has become a key task for public administrations (Andersen, 2009). According to Kierkegaard (2009), "a good government must be seen to be real", therefore the principle of transparency must be addressed with a comprehensive, multidirectional and holistic approach in order to comprehensive approach to materialise the principles of citizen participation (Muñoz Machado, 1977).

In this context, the aim of this paper is to determine the relationship between efficiency and transparency in Spanish universities. Specifically, the aim is to determine whether the most efficient universities are also those with the highest level of disclosure of information on their websites.

To this end, two clearly differentiated methodologies are established to measure efficiency and transparency. In relation to the first the order-m data panel (Garrido-Rodríguez et al., 2018) developed by applying the panel data extension by Surroca et al. (2016) to order-m frontiers (Cazals et al., 2002) stands out. Thus, with this methodology it is possible to obtain more robust results than those obtained by using traditional non-parametric techniques, by controlling for the possible presence of outliers and random disturbances that may appear at certain points in time.

On the other hand, an index measuring transparency is created for each University. For the creation of this index, we start from the different requirements that Law 19/2013 established as compulsory for public administrations, placing ourselves in the regulatory context of universities, giving a complete the regulatory context of the universities, giving a complete approach and developing the index in two fundamental pillars: breadth and depth.

To complete the model, a series of independent variables that can condition the levels of efficiency and transparency are specified: socio-economic factors, levels of subsidies received, income from fees and levels of debt, among others. In this sense, we regress the level of efficiency and transparency of Spanish universities, applying the Generalized Method of Moments (MGM) to deal with the endogeneity as we do not know exactly whether transparency leads to a university being more efficient or, on the contrary, it is efficiency that leads to the university being more transparent.

Keywords:

Digitalization, Universitues, efficiency, transparency.