engleski

THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING IN MEASURING EFFICIENCY IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Purpose – During the current financial and economic crisis, public sector efficiency is at the heart of debate. Since education investment can have a lag of 20 years and is faced with lower budgets, many countries invested less in education arguing that they had been so far inefficiently spent. However, academic literature is not unanimous in the type of accounting measures to be used to measure public education’s efficiency. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to determine which efficiency measures are most widely used in academic literature, and what influences their design. In addition, we would like to find out if and how efficiency measures of public education changed over time, and which is the role of accounting in its contemporary understanding. Design/methodology/approach – We performed a comprehensive literature analysis of research papers published in public sector, management and accounting journals since 1990 to answer the following research questions: 1) how is efficiency of education defined in research literature, 2) how is efficiency of education measured in accounting system of education providers, and 3) how these measures changed over time. Findings - The analysis confirms that most efficiency measures are still oriented towards cost minimization. However, over time due to a growing diversity of accounting data, efficiency measures have become more sophisticated and multidimensional to encourage education providers not only towards cost minimization but also towards increasing of output quality. Furthermore, our survey indicates that the research focus has shifted from measuring efficiency towards the evaluation of implementation measures in terms of social responsibility by application of contemporary accounting methods. Research limitations/implications – The study reveals that simple efficiency indicators frequently used for allocation of public funds to education providers often leads to undesirable results in terms of lower quality output. However, the literature review is limited to research papers published in English, addressing mostly education providers in developed countries. To get a better understanding of efficiency measures in public education, there should also be analyses of studies conducted in other cultural environments and published in other languages.

Efficiency; Accounting for public education; Literature review

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