Comparing the evolution of productivity and performance gaps in education systems through DEA: an application to Latin American countries

The main objective of this paper is to propose a tool for measuring the productiv ity and performance gaps across a set of Decision Making Units for monitoring
their evolution and analyzing their components over time. To do this, we use the
approach proposed by Aparicio and Santín (Eur J Oper Res 267(1):227–235, 2018)
which is grounded on a base-group base-period productivity index and Data Envel opment Analysis. Additionally, we propose a new index for measuring the perfor mance gap between two or more groups of production units and its decomposition
in efectiveness gap and outcome possibility set gap. As an empirical illustration of
the approach, we focus our attention on the educational sector. In particular, we ana lyze six Latin American countries over time. For this purpose, we rely on OECD–
PISA data aggregated at school level. Over the period 2006–2018, performance and
productivity followed very diferent paths in each country showing that the correla tion between school performance and productivity is very low. Therefore, we sug gest that the simultaneous analysis of performance and productivity gaps together
with their evolution over time is a must in order to benchmark countries and monitor
improvements and weaknesses in education systems.