Long-term efficiency of public service provision in a context of budget restrictions. An application to the education sector

Abstract This paper proposes an extension of the non-parametric long-term evaluation of efficiency, the conditional panel data DEA model, which takes into account the panel structure of the data and, at the same time, incorporates the role of contextual factors in the estimations. Its application to the education sector for the period analyzed (2009–2014) shows the utility of this method, since it obtains more representative efficiency scores for the complete time-period, is more robust to external shocks, and allows improvements to the decision-making process in the allocation of the budget available for the public education sector. The results are clear and present an evolution towards the convergence of the efficiency scores, precisely in a time period when hard budget constraints severely reduced the resources available for public schools.