Nevertheless, few studies examine technical efficiency in secondary education.1
For example,
Afonso and St. Aubyn (2006a) evaluated efficiency in providing secondary education across
OECD countries by assessing outputs (student performance) against inputs directly used in
the education system (teachers, student time) and environment variables (wealth and parents’
education). In methodological terms, they employed a two-stage semi-parametric procedure.
Firstly, output efficiency scores were estimated by solving a standard DEA problem with
countries as DMUs. Secondly, these scores were explained in a regression with the
environmental variables as independent variables. Results from the first stage imply that, on
average, countries could have increased their results by 11.6 % using the same resources.
Since very insightful, cross-country analyses, particularly for the secondary education sector,
are rarely used for policy analysis, we will apply the DEA approach to several EU (plus
Croatia) and OECD countries, with a special focus on Slovenia and Croatia in the rest of the
paper. DEA is chosen here because it is more reliable for measuring technical efficiency as it
can be applied to multi-input and multi-output variables. The analysis includes 31 EU (plus
Croatia) and OECD countries in 1999–2007 period. The paper is divided into three parts.
After presenting some literature review of previous theoretical and empirical studies in this
section, research methodology and the results of the DEA analysis are provided in the second
part. Finally, the paper ends with a conclusion.