Publicly finance schools productivity comparison for Basque Country through a new Educational Malmquist index approach.

It is well known in the educational literature that public and private-voucher schools show different production technologies and present differences in the productivity of their educational inputs due to management issues. On the one hand the students attending public schools differ in their socioeconomic characteristics from students in the private-voucher (private management and funded by the government) ones. In this paper we propose a new non-parametric Educational Malmquist index approach in order to analyze total factor productivity changes and divergences between publicly financed schools when only a pseudo-panel database is available. This paper includes an empirical analysis for the Spanish region Basque Country, who has a representative sample in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003, 2006 and 2009. PISA includes a wide variety of background information on the students collected by student questionnaires and about schools resources. The results suggest a higher annual productivity change for government dependent private schools, mostly due to technical divergences among both school types. Similarly, the general productivity evolution among, public and government dependent private, schools within 2003-2009 benefits government dependent private schools in all cases, although this figures seem not to be significant.