Educational Efficiency and Economic Growth: Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract:     
Using the education-growth nexus theory, this paper examines whether the efficiency of education can have any influence on economic growth of a country. We obtain two main results. First, employing the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to estimate the efficiency of Bangladesh education sectors (secondary and tertiary level), we find that secondary education is the most efficient education sector operating at the efficient frontiers or at the most productive scale size (MPSS) for more periods than that of higher education. Second, modeling several proxies of economic growth as a function of the efficiency scores for different education sectors, we find that economic growth is associated positively with most of the efficiency scores indicating that the higher the efficiency in education the higher is the economic growth. Such empirical evidence encourages theoretical work relating efficiency of education to the promotion of economic growth.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 24

Keywords: Efficiency, Education, DEA, Economic Growth, Bangladesh

JEL Classification: A20, C14, H52, I21, O40

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