The impact of the economic crisis on the (in)efficiency of public Higher Education institutions in Southern Europe: The case of Spanish universities

The evaluation of university efficiency in Europe began timidly when the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) was created. However, this issue is currently becoming increasingly important in Southern European countries, where the limitation of public funding following the economic crisis in 2008 has put greater pressure on their public universities to achieve excellence and improve competitiveness. In this context, the goals of this paper are: first, to measure the relative technical (in)efficiency of Spanish public Higher Education Institutions in the period 2002–03 to 2012–13, comparing the situation before and during the last economic crisis; and, second, to analyze the determinants of university (in)efficiency and, especially, the direct impact of the crisis. After applying the two-stage double bootstrap DEA methodology, the results show that Spanish public universities have become more efficient during the crisis than before it. In fact, the regression analysis confirms that the “crisis” variable has had a statistically significant positive impact on university efficiency. We also find that age has favorably influenced how these institutions utilize their resources to produce teaching and research outputs, but technical specialization has had a negative effect. Moreover, the regional location of public universities has been also a crucial determinant of their efficiency level. Our findings are therefore relevant for political and academic decision-makers in order to know if public universities have been adequately managed in the crisis period and to identify factors that could improve their efficiency, and hence to help them to enhance their international competitiveness in the future.     

Higher education: marketing in a quasi‐commercial service industry

The UK Government is promoting widening participation and asking universities to develop their student intake of 18–30 year‐olds by 50 per cent by 2010. The financing of these changes is encouraging a marketing emphasis shift, as funding is reduced and alternative revenue methods sought. Traditional marketing of charitable educational institutions sought to ensure sufficient student enrolments for solely government‐funded core activities. Further marketing is now seen in quasi‐commercial activities. This paper investigates the need for a further marketing approach to satisfy these government policy changes. Using the comparative method, the paper looks at the complexity of the issues around US and UK higher education and their revenue value conflicts, marketing perspectives and, finally, the differences in perspectives and expectations between commerce and education. As the matter is current and ongoing, the main form of collecting evidence is through personal interview and recent media releases. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

高等教育利用资本市场融资探析

虽然我国已经初步建立起高等教育的多渠道筹资体制,但目前依然存在高等教育经费的主渠道薄弱,结构不合理等诸多问题,导致政府财政压力过大,高等教育经费投入严重不足。要发展高等教育就必须充分利用市场的资源配置功能,扩大和调整现在筹资渠道,提高经费的使用效率。     

中国高校人力资源管理创新绩效评价研究

利用DEA方法对我国2005-2009年的高校人力资源管理创新绩效进行了评价和分析,并运用Malmquist生产率指数对其绩效变动进行了测算。结果显示,我国高校人力资源管理创新绩效水平较为低下,纯技术效率低下是其主要原因;全要素生产率呈现较为显著的增长趋势,技术效率水平提高是引致TFP增长的主要原因,而技术进步对TFP有负面效应;我国高校人力资源管理创新绩效水平存在较为显著的省际和区域差异。     

Colombian higher education institutions evaluation

Over the last twenty years, access to higher education has grown extraordinarily in Latin America. Higher education systems have been challenged to improve their efficiency while strengthening quality assurance processes. In Colombia, the government and the researchers developed models to assess the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Nevertheless, the current scholarship does not have a model that allows the system to measure multiple efficiencies in a diverse environment. In this study, we address the challenge of evaluating the efficiency of HEIs taking into account different goals of the Colombian education system. To this aim, we extend a cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to evaluate the efficiency of Colombian HEIs in the presence of flexible measures. While some HEIs are efficient in terms of teaching or employment, others are efficient in terms of research. Therefore, the model suggests broader policies to achieve the efficiency of the institutions under multiple goals.     

高校资产管理与预算管理的结合研究

随着我国经济水平的不断提高,我国经济发展不断加快。我国的教育也在良好的经济形式支持下得到了较大的发展。同时,国家为了促进教育,特别是高校教育的进一步发展,对于高校的教育经费投入也在逐渐增加。因此,高校在新形势下,如何管理和控制好国家发放的教育经费成了当前高校资产管理的重要工作内容。特别是国家经费到达学校后的优化使用是高校当前的财务管理重点关注内容,其中,将资产管理与预算管理结合起来能够有效解决这种问题。     

Regional technical efficiency of Chinese Iron and steel industry based on bootstrap network data envelopment analysis

This paper analyses the regional technical efficiency of Chinese iron and steel industry from 1996 to 2010 by a network DEA procedure, and provides the smoothed bootstrap network DEA strategy for the sensitivity analysis of the efficiency measure to sampling variation of the estimated frontier. Furthermore, the evolution and convergence characteristics of regional technical efficiency are examined by a dynamic regression model based on different regional divisions of China. The empirical results show that there exist significant geographical differences in the technical efficiency of Chinese iron and steel industry. On the one hand, the technical efficiency of the eastern area, the central area and the western area is unbalanced, with a lower efficiency in the west and a higher one in the east. On the other hand, technical efficiency of Central Bohai, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta economic zones is higher than that of the other economic zones. In addition, the technical efficiency has a significant improvement during the period of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. Following the convergence notation in economic growth theory, this paper also gives some convergence evidence of the technical efficiency towards the efficient frontier due to the catching-up effect. Finally, this paper explores the determinants of the technical efficiency, and discusses policy implications for Chinese iron and steel industry.     

The contribution of research and innovation to productivity

This paper examines the impact of investment in research and innovation on Australian market sector productivity. While previous studies have largely focused on a narrow class of private sector intangible assets as a source of productivity gains, this paper shows that there is a broad range of other business sector intangible assets that can significantly affect productivity. Moreover, the paper pays special attention to the role played by public funding for research and innovation. The empirical results suggest that there are significant spillovers to productivity from public sector R&D spending on research agencies and higher education. No evidence is found for productivity spillovers from indirect public funding for the business enterprise sector, civil sector or defence R&D. These findings have implications for government innovation policy as they provide insights into possible productivity gains from government funding reallocations.     

我国大陆主要集装箱港口相对有效性评价

以数据包络分析(DEA)的BC2模型为基础,选取泊位长度、堆场面积和桥吊数量为输入项,吞吐量为输出项,从定量角度对我国大陆主要集装箱港口的相对有效性进行了评价。结合评价结果,对各港口的有效和无效原因做了初步的分析。     

政策支持、企业投资与旅游业效率

本文对30家旅游上市公司2009—2018年的数据包络分析效率值进行纠偏修正,并构建政策支持与企业投资对于旅游企业运营效率的影响因素模型,运用Bootstrap截断回归法进行实证分析。研究结果表明,旅游上市公司整体上处于非有效状态;政府补贴与金融支持会对企业运营效率产生抑制作用;企业投资对效率的提升作用是决定性的,远远大于政府补贴和金融支持的负面作用。     

Universities’ efficiency and the socioeconomic characteristics of their environment — Evidence from an empirical analysis

This paper investigates how the efficiency of universities is affected by the characteristics of the territory in which they operate. The theoretical framework combines two perspectives: (1) the resource dependence theory, suggesting that the location of university can determine the amount of resources available to it; (2) institutional isomorphism, according to which the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same area may shape the university production function and the efficiency of its operations. In order to test this framework we use data on Russian universities and a non-parametric conditional order-m efficiency estimator with two categories of contextual variables. The first group includes the social, economic and cultural characteristics of the region where the university is located, while the second deal with the characteristics of other higher education institutions located in the same region. The main contribution of this paper is that it applies efficiency models that incorporate exogenous factors associated with a geographical area in context of higher education. Our findings highlight that the managerial efficiency of universities is strongly associated with the contextual factors of the environment in which they are embedded. Important policy implication of this result is that different public policies in higher education should treat particular universities differently depending on characteristics of context in which they operate.     

Are all Scales Optimal in DEA? Theory and Empirical Evidence

Policy recommendations concerning optimal scale of production units may have serious implications for the restructuring of a sector. The piecewise linear frontier production function framework (DEA) is becoming the most popular one for assessing not only technical efficiency of operations, but also for scale efficiency and calculation of optimal scale sizes. The main purpose of the present study is to investigate if neoclassical production theory gives any guidance as to the nature of scale properties in the DEA model, and empirically explore such properties. Theoretical results indicate that the DEA model may have more irregular properties than usually assumed in neoclassical production theory, concerning shape of optimal scale curves and the M-locus. The empirical results indicate that optimal scale may be found over almost the entire size variations in outputs and inputs, thus making policy recommendations about efficient scale difficult. It seems necessary to establish the nature of optimal scale before any practical conclusions can be drawn. Proposals for indexes characterizing the nature of optimal scale are provided.     

DEA ARs and CRs applied to worldwide major oil companies

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods were applied to data of 14 major oil companies (Majors) for the years 1980–1987. The oil model focuses on the worldwide reserve exploration and oil production activities. Data were reported by Arthur Andersen & Co.'sOil & Gas Reserve Disclosures.Newly developed DEA theory was used to link the input and output multiplier bounds and to measure maximum and minimum profit ratios. Also, this theory was used to identify uniquely inefficient firms and to project them uniquely to the DEA frontier.The DEA profit and efficiency measures partitioned the firms into low and high achievers. Discriminant analysis of a similarly constructed data base lends statistical support to this partition.With DEA, top-managers of major oil companies may capture the cost savings/profit ratio gains of making inefficient firms efficient. DEA allows them to benchmark entire firms against the best-practice norm. Looking outwardly, they may gain much more from adapting best-practice competitor practices than from just looking inwardly searching for small marginal gains.     

Research efficiency analysis of China's university faculty members: A modified meta-frontier DEA approach

Traditionally, data envelopment analysis (DEA) requires all decision-making units (DMUs) to have similar characteristics and experiences within the same external conditions. In many cases, this assumption fails to hold, and thus, difficulties will be encountered to some extent when measuring efficiency with a standard DEA model. Ideally, the performance of DMUs with different characteristics could be examined using the DEA meta-frontier framework. However, some of these DMUs are mixed-type DMUs that may affiliate with more than one group. Furthermore, the total number of observations of these mixed-type DMUs is limited. This is one of the common problems when studies focus on faculty research performance in higher education institutions. In general, a faculty member is affiliated with a certain department, and if the departmental assessment policy is not suitable for faculty members who are involved in interdisciplinary research, their performance could be underestimated. Therefore, the proposed model is an extension of the DEA meta-frontier framework that can assess the performance of mixed-type DMUs by constructing the reference set without the same type of DMUs. In this paper, the scientific research efficiency of faculty members at the Inner Mongolia University is used as an example to provide a better understanding of the proposed model. The proposed model is intended to provide a fair and balanced performance assessment method that reflects actual performance, especially for mixed-type DMUs.     

Assessing academic department efficiency at a public university

The assessment of public universities has gained importance because of the demands from such state government bodies as the executive and the legislature. Public universities are increasingly being asked to account for how efficiently they have used diminishing state financial resources. Administrators thus have the responsibility of ensuring that the university's financial, human, and physical resources are allocated to academic departments in a manner that enhances the institution's efficiency. In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed for evaluating the efficiency of academic departments at a public university. DEA provides a single measure of efficiency for each academic unit. It also identifies the causes behind the inefficiencies exhibited by poor performing units, as well as the changes that these units need to make in order to improve their efficiencies. Its usefulness as a planning tool is also discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Cost Indirect Evaluation of Productivity Change in UK Universities

The study provides an empirical analysis of productivity change in publicly-funded UK universities, against a background of government policy specifically designed to enhance the productive efficiency of universities in the provision of teaching and research. The nonparametric analysis employs a cost indirect approach to measuring productivity change, taking explicit account of the quality of research output and decomposing productivity change into technical change and efficiency change. The latter is also decomposed into changes in pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and output congestion. Changes in size efficiency are also computed. On average, productivity declined by 4% over 1989–92, mainly as a result of regressive technical change. Evidence of biased technological change was found, with the frontier shifting out in favour of the teaching outputs and in relative to the research output.     

关于大学生就业创业指导体系的研究

构建大学生就业创业指导体系是服务国家加快转变经济发展方式、建设创新型国家和人力资源强国的战略举措,是深化高等教育教学改革、提高人才培养质量、促进大学生全面发展的重要途径,是落实以创业带动就业、促进高校毕业生充分就业的重要措施。本课题通过对大学生开展就业创业调查问卷,梳理高校大学生就业创业指导体系,参考有关研究成果,在目前国内外对大学生就业创业政策、培训体系、帮扶体系、孵化平台、协调机制研及职业指导体系的基础上,结合山东药品食品职业学院就业创业工作实际,构建立足地方行业企业,结合地方经济发展的大学生一体化、专家化、全程化、信息化的就业创业指导体系。     

中国各地区集约经济运营绩效的DEA评价

DEA方法是进行相对有效性评价的一种方法。其最先提出并被广泛应用的C2R模型可同时判断决策单元是否同时满足技术有效和规模有效。通过利用DEA模型对我国30个地区的集约经营效率进行了分析评价,并探讨了制约我国各地区集约经济发展的重要因素及其对策问题。     

高校财务报账存在的问题及优化策略探讨

随着高校招生的扩大,高等教育事业的蓬勃发展,办学模式趋于多样化,高校教育经费来源不断增加,使得高等院校的财务管理工作日益多元化和复杂化,作为高校管理重要的组成部分,财务管理面临着前所未有的机遇和挑战。本文分析西安科技大学财务管理现状,以此探讨高校财务报账的发展趋势,针对各高校出现的财务报账突出问题,结合高校办学模式的实践经验,给出了优化财务工作的策略,对完善该校财务工作有实践指导意义。     

Disentangling the efficiency drivers in country-level global health programs: An empirical study

Motivated by the cost reductions and outcome improvements generated by benchmarking in many industries, we focus on in-country global health programs to identify and quantify opportunities for process improvement. We empirically study the major efficiency drivers of reproductive health (RH) country programs in Sub-Saharan Africa sponsored by international funding organizations. To ensure a level playing field for comparison across countries, we quantify the impact of cross-country heterogeneity and random shocks on the efficiency of RH programs. To analyze these relationships and isolate the effects attributable to managerial inefficiency, we use a three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)/Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model. We show the impact of environmental factors on program efficiency, linking policy making decisions with operational and health outcome performance. We also show that donor fragmentation negatively impacts managerial efficiency, and we suggest actions to mitigate this effect. We then provide a way to improve performance through benchmarking efforts within groups of countries and present an initial prototype of such efforts.