Efficiency, Technology and Productivity Change in Bangladeshi Universities

Abstract

The efficiency of universities has attracted strong attention in recent years, not only due to the ever‐increasing public funding made available to the universities, but also because universities play a significant role in shaping the future of any nation. This thesis explores the performance of forty universities in Bangladesh for the period 2003 to 2008 using data envelopment analysis. Using Data Envelopment Analysis Program (DEAP), technical and scale efficiency measures are obtained for a combined set of 40 universities as well as independent public and private university data. The mean VRS technical efficiency for the combined, public and private sets was 0.79, 0.90 and 0.805, respectively. Using the Decomposing Productivity Index Numbers (DPIN) program, productivity measures are decomposed into changes in technology, output and input technical efficiency, output and input scale efficiency, and output and input mix efficiency. Total factor productivity was found to have varied widely across the sample. The results show that universities achieved mean output and input technical efficiency measures for the whole period of 0.72 and 0.78, respectively. Mean output and input scale efficiency measures were 0.83 and 0.76, and mean output and input mix efficiency measures were 0.88 and 0.42, respectively. The relatively low mean input mix efficiency score probably reflects the inflexibility that universities have in adjusting their input mixes to changing student enrolments. The results also suggest that public universities performed better on average than private universities on all efficiency scores over the study period. This research constitutes a preliminary analysis of efficiency change of Bangladeshi universities.