Input efficiency in publicly provided education: the case of Romania

How can secondary education in Romania be improved? The authors of the paper attempt to:

• describe the Romanian secondary education and its developments during the last decade of transition
• estimate the production function of the publicly provided lower and upper level of secondary education
• suggest how public resources should be spent to maximize the efficiency of the secondary school system in Romania

The authors use nine panel data sets to find that there are no individual fixed effects across the countries under analysis, and there are no structural changes in secondary education, both lower and upper level during 1999-2002 in those countries.

The major findings of the study are:

• there is a close relationship between school resources and test score achievements, and the intensity of the relationship varies upon the student cohort age, the area of school location and students’ gender
• among the most effective school resources in generating high test scores are the number and quality of teachers; the student- teacher ratio has a negative and significant effect on graduates’ test score, while the share of qualified teachers and full time teachers has a significant positive effect
• large schools have a significant positive effect on test scores of graduates in urban areas as well as on test scores of female graduates from rural areas
• fragmenting the teaching process within laboratories and workshops does not affect school performance positively either in urban or in rural areas
• families' wealth negatively affects the performance of lower level secondary school female graduates

Based on their results, the authors conclude that more public money for secondary education in Romania should be spent on:

• increasing the number and quality of the teaching staff
• revision of the organizational structure of secondary schools