Francisco Manuel Pedraja Chaparro

Rendimiento educativo y determinantes según PISA : una revisión de la literatura en España

La publicacion de los resultados de la cuarta oleada del Informe PISA ha vuelto a poner de relieve la distancia que sigue existiendo entre Espana y el resto de paises. El evidente interes por reducir esa distancia ha dado lugar en los ultimos anos a la proliferacion de estudios empiricos que, tomando como base la informacion proporcionada por esta base de datos, han tratado de indagar acerca de cuales son los principales determinantes del rendimiento educativo en nuestro pais. El objetivo de este trabajo es revisar sistematicamente estas investigaciones con el proposito de clasificarlas, ordenarlas y extraer sus principales conclusiones, cuyo interes para el desarrollo de medidas de politica educativa resulta evidente. De acuerdo con este objetivo, los trabajos pueden dividirse fundamentalmente en dos grandes bloques segun su enfoque metodologico: los que utilizan un analisis de regresion para determinar si existe algun tipo de relacion estadistica significativa entre un unico indicador representativo del output educativo y un conjunto de variables explicativas, y los que emplean un enfoque de tipo frontera, en los que se acepta que pueden existir comportamientos ineficientes por parte de los alumnos. A pesar de los diferentes enfoques utilizados, la mayoria de los trabajos coinciden en identificar las variables de tipo socioeconomico, la repeticion de curso o la concentracion de inmigrantes como principales determinantes del rendimiento educativo, mientras que los factores asociados con los recursos escolares tienen un poder explicativo muy bajo. Asimismo, la variacion de los resultados atribuible a las escuelas es relativamente pequena y se explica, en su mayor parte, por las caracteristicas de los alumnos. Por ultimo, cabe destacar que, una vez que se tienen en cuenta las variables socioeconomicas asociadas a las familias de los alumnos, las diferencias en los resultados obtenidos por los centros publicos, privados y concertados no son significativas.

Evaluating the introduction of a quasi-market in community care

Abstract It is often the case that only routinely collected, highly aggregate administrative data are available for the purposes of evaluating major public policy initiatives. Such data clearly fall short of the information advocated by statisticians and economists for the purposes of policy evaluation. This paper examines the extent to which methodologies developed in the productivity literature can nevertheless extract useful evaluative information from administrative data. A non-parametric Malmquist Index approach is used that seeks to decompose changes in efficiency into technical efficiency changes, scale effects and technological change. The study applies the methods to the system of “community care” introduced in 1993 for people affected by problems associated with ageing, mental illness, learning disability or physical disability. Non-parametric methods are used to estimate productivity changes amongst 39 English county councils over a four-year period from 1992 to 1995. The results suggest a steady annual increase in productivity of about 1.4% per annum over the period under investigation, but it is not possible to determine the extent to which this progress can be attributed to the introduction of community care. The paper nevertheless concludes that the methods deployed can exploit readily available datasets at low cost, and are a valuable form of exploratory data analysis, if interpreted with discretion.

Efficiency assessment of real estate cadastral offices using DEA

This article describes an approach to measuring efficiency of a set of units operating in an administrative public service context, namely real estate cadastral offices, a venue which has not been analysed previously in the reported literature. This study was madepossible thanks to the dataset provided by the Directorate General of Real Estate Cadastral Assessment and includes relevant information on regional cadastral offices in Spain over the time period 2000 to 2005. Data Envelopment Analysis and Malmquist indices were used to estimate the efficiency levels of these units. The results of these analyses revealed the existence of significant differences between average efficiency levels and the identification of efficient units throughout the period under consideration, although it is possible to detect a substantial improvement in technical efficiency for the last two years of the data collection period, when the new regulation about real estate evaluation came into effect. Likewise, the estimation of a second stage model based on bootstrap techniques highlights the importance of collaborating with other public sector agents to enhance efficiency levels. Points for practitioners This article provides an empirical analysis of units providing cadastral services in Spain using Data Envelopment Analysis. This technique is an excellent tool for professionals working in public management and administration since it is easy to implement and allows identifying the best performers among producers operating in a field, which can be considered as benchmarks for other units searching to improve their results. Ourresults confirm that the units collaborating with other public sector agents (mainly councils and notaries) accomplish enhanced performances in terms of efficiency. This evidence can be useful for policy-makers interested in reducing costs and improving the organization of administrative units.