Abstract:

The scarcity of public resources makes it necessary to allocate the resources available in the most efficient way, and public administrations are no exception. Moreover, to this obligation as a manager must be added the temporary context of continuous cross-border crises experienced in recent decades, which has increased the attention and concern among political and institutional decision-makers about university systems (López-Torres and Prior, 2020; Agasisti et al., 2021).

Universities are one of the most important public institutions in the national economy, as they are creators and disseminators of knowledge through their research, teaching and transfer activities. They also manage an important volume of economic resources and have a large number of employees of very diverse categories.

On the other hand, the university system is characterized by a high level of competitiveness 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).

Specifically, the Spanish university system must also meet the requirements of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which obliges Spanish universities to improve their performance and competitiveness at the international level (López-Torres and Prior, 2020).

In this context, the aim of this paper is to analyze the efficiency of the Spanish university system for the period 2015-2020, through the application of order-m frontiers with panel data that allows obtaining more robust estimates than traditional nonparametric frontier evaluation techniques, as well as making temporal comparisons of efficiency estimates (Pérez-López et al., 2018; Garrido-Rodríguez et al., 2018).

With this procedure it is possible to estimate, on the one hand, the efficiency of Spanish universities for each of the years considered in the analysis, which allows us to analyze the evolution of each of the universities. On the other hand, with this methodology, it is possible to estimate the average efficiency that each university has for the entire period covered, allowing to have an overall view of the position that each university has within the Spanish university system for the period analyzed.

References:
[1] Agasisti, T., Egorov, A., Zinchenko, D. and Leshukov, O. (2021). Efficiency of regional Higher Education systems and regional economic short-run growth: empirical evidence from Russia. Industry and Innovation, 28(4): 507-534.
[2] Clarke, M., Drennan, J., Hyde, A., and Politis, Y. (2018). The impact of austerity on Irish Higher Education faculty. Higher Education, 75(6): 1047-1060.
[3] Garrido-Rodríguez, J.C.; Pérez-López, G.; Zafra-Gómez, J.L.; Prior, D. (2018). Estimating long-run efficiency in local public services using robust frontiers with panel data. Hacienda Pública Española, 226(3): 11-36.
[4] López-Torres, L. and Prior, D. (2020). Long-term efficiency of public service provision in a context of budget constraints. An application to the education sector. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 81, 100946.
[5] Pérez-López, G.; Prior, D.; Zafra-Gómez, J.L. Temporal scale efficiency in DEA panel data estimations. An application to the solid waste disposal service in Spain. Omega, 76: 18-27

Keywords:

Efficiency, universities.