Efficiency of Eastern European schools and the role of their context

Abstract In this paper we investigate the drivers of efficiency of Central and Eastern European schools as a function of their inputs, outputs, and the environmental factors that influence their efficiency. The data contains 3,608 schools across 17 countries in the Europe-East region. We use a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis approach with a double-bootstrap truncated regression in the second stage to achieve our objectives. Our results show that on average many countries seem to have bottlenecks in their schools' performances in math subjects while reading subjects seem to be a major positive contributor to their efficiency. Moreover, food insecurity (as a result of financial troubles) has a severe negative impact on our sample's efficiencies, a similar effect was observed as well for the average level of parents' education.