Economy & Business, Volume 8, 2014

Abstract: The paper joins the efforts of other scholars in investigating education efficiency by applying a non-parametric methodology. Most importantly, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique is presented and then applied to the wide range of the EU and OECD countries to evaluate technical efficiency within the selected education sector in 1999-2008 period. The empirical results show that within a selected group of EU member states Denmark, Hungary and Portugal are seen as most efficient in primary education sector. In addition, some countries come very close to the frontier (e.g. Czech R. and Italy), while the other countries are further away and therefore less efficient (e.g. Turkey). On the other hand, the least efficient countries are Belgium, Sweden and Croatia. The empirical findings also point out that the new EU member states are relatively more efficient than non-EU countries in the sample, however, they show relatively low efficiency against the old EU-member states.