Assessing Primary and Lower Secondary School Efficiency Within Northern, Central and Southern Italy

Giuseppe Di Giacomo and Aline Pennisi

Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, 2015, vol. 1, issue 2, 287-311

Abstract: This paper explores the efficiency of primary and lower secondary schools in Italy from a productivity perspective. Inputs are related to human and financial resources of schools and outputs represent the achievement in math and reading of their students. The analysis is conducted on a statistical sample of more than a thousand primary and lower secondary schools. We use data envelopment analysis to estimate efficiency and a second-stage model to identify its determinants. Keeping inputs constant, the estimated efficiency distributions indicate there are greater margins of improvement in primary education respect to lower secondary education. In both levels of education, potential productivity gains are particularly large in the South. Factors determining efficiency vary according to the geographical area. A general result is that critical financial management issues have no role in determining efficiency while contextual factors do (despite the fact that the school’s average social and economic background is specified in the model as an input). Finally, in the South, being a comprehensive rather than a specialized school can be a factor of inefficiency; this may point out to emerging difficulties in the implementation of legislative provisions directed to rationalizing the school system. Copyright Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association) 2015

Keywords: Efficiency; Productivity; Data envelopment analysis; Economies of scale; Resource allocation; Educational economics; I21; I22; H52; H83; D24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s40797-014-0002-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:italej:v:1:y:2015:i:2:p:287-311

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40797

DOI: 10.1007/s40797-014-0002-3

Access Statistics for this article

Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti is currently edited by Roberto Cellini

More articles in Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti from Springer, Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().