The efficiency of public schools: the case of Kuwait

Nadeem A. Burney, Jill Johnes, Mohammed Al-Enezi and Marwa Al-Musallam

Education Economics, 2013, vol. 21, issue 4, 360-379

Abstract: This paper investigates the technical, and allocative efficiencies of public schools in Kuwait over four levels of schooling (kindergartens, primary, intermediate and secondary) and two periods (1999/2000 and 2004/2005) using data envelopment analysis. Mean pure technical efficiency varies between 0.695 and 0.852 across all levels of education; the majority of schools at kindergarten, primary and intermediate levels are operating at a point where returns to scale are increasing, and there are considerable cost efficiencies to be gained. In a second-stage analysis of the determinants of efficiency, teacher salary and the proportion of teaching staff who are Kuwaiti are highly significant in explaining school efficiency at all levels. The former has a positive effect and the latter a negative effect. All-girls schools have significantly higher efficiency than all-boys schools. There is limited evidence that geographical location affects efficiency, and this may be a consequence of differences between regions in terms of affluence or density of population.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2011.595580 (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:taf:edecon:v:21:y:2013:i:4:p:360-379

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEDE20

DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2011.595580

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is currently edited by Caren Wareing and Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().