A decomposition of productivity measures for Bangladesh universities

The efficiency of universities has attracted strong attention in recent years, not only due to the ever-increasing public funding made available to the universities, but also because universities play a significant role in shaping the future of any nation. In this study, we measure the performance of forty universities in Bangladesh for the period 2003 to 2008 using data envelopment analysis. Using the DPIN program, productivity measures are decomposed into changes in technology, output and input technical efficiency, output and input scale efficiency, and output and input mix efficiency. Total factor productivity was found to have varied widely across the sample. Our preliminary results confirm that universities achieved mean output and input technical efficiency measures for the whole period of 0.72 and 0.78, respectively. Mean output and input scale efficiency measures were 0.83 and 0.76, and mean output and input mix efficiency measures were 0.88 and 0.42, respectively. The relatively low mean input mix efficiency score probably reflects the inflexibility that universities have in adjusting their input mixes to changing student enrolments. Our results also suggest that public universities performed better on average than private universities on all efficiency scores over the study period. This study constitutes a preliminary analysis of efficiency change of Bangladeshi Universities, and we have some concerns with data quality and the availability of data on output variables that are currently being examined with the aim to provide a more suitable data set for analysis in the future.