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School productive performance and technology gaps: new evidence from PISA 2018

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Improving educational outcomes is a global political imperative due to its favourable influence on a country’s economic prosperity. Although researchers have endeavoured to gauge school performance through diverse data resources and techniques, there remains a lack of clarity regarding the factors that enhance school effectiveness. Using the latest version of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2018), this paper employs a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) to investigate the factors underlying the performance of 8825 schools across 34 OECD countries in terms of their national and international technological capabilities. The central idea is that technological heterogeneity and the technology gap significantly influence the benchmarking process. The findings confirm the presence of substantial technology gaps, indicating that the examined schools are unable to fully harness their potential due to limitations in metatechnology. These gaps are influenced by student characteristics, school features and educational practices.

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  • Capasso Salvatore & Maria Kaisari & Konstantinos Kounetas & Elias Lainas, 2023. "School productive performance and technology gaps: new evidence from PISA 2018," CSEF Working Papers 696, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.
    • Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:696
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis; School’s productive performance; Technology gap; PISA.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • Q40 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - General

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