A Non-parametric Estimation for Efficacy of Government Expenditure on Secondary Education

Abstract: The paper is aimed to analyse the efficacy of government expenditure on secondary education in Purulia district of West- Bengal, India. Efficacy relates the input or the output to the final objectives of the analysis to be achieved, i.e. the outcome. Education facility is mainly a mixed good which is partly excludable and partly rivalry. India has been suffering from poverty and illiteracy problem for decades. Illiteracy and low level of education is a factor for widespread poverty in India. Among the education system, secondary education plays a crucial role to enhance the human development level which ultimately contributes in development process. So, government should give emphasis on secondary education and it should be concerned about the efficacy of the government expenditure on secondary education. As in the present scenario, the structural adjustment policy (SAP) leads to some sort of cut back on expenditure on education. This study first calculates the technical efficiency as well as the scale efficiency of government expenditure on secondary education of school using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), then categorize the schools into low, moderate and high according to the value of technical efficiency and scale efficiency based on three models (i) considering all inputs (Teacher Student Ratio, Expenditure per Student, % of Students belong to SC, % of Students belong to ST, % of Students belong to OBC, % of Teacher with Professional Qualification, Student- Classroom Ratio, % of Girl’s Student Enrolment) (ii) considering prime two inputs (Student-Teacher Ratio and Expenditure per Student) and (iii) considering only one input (Expenditure per Student) and try to find out the reason of differences in efficiency. The common set of schools from High, Moderate and Low efficiency schools considering above said three models are further analysed with the primary data collected from the student sets to analyse whether the school efficiency affect the student’s individual performance or not with the help of regression analysis.