Recent policy suggestions from the European Community underlined the importance of “efficiency” and “equity” in the provision of education while, at the same time, the European countries are required to provide their educational services by minimizing the amount of public money devoted...

In 2000, the Lombardy Regional government introduced, for the first time in Italy, a voucher plan to stimulate families to enroll their children to private schools. After this intervention, many other Regions launched similar policies. Despite the high political attention to this theme in Italy,...

In many countries, governments abandoned negotiated methods for allocating public resources among universities, moving towards the adoption of formula-funding models. From a policy perspective, a relevant issue is to correctly design such formulas, to stimulate universities in pursuing better...

The objective of this paper is an efficiency analysis about Higher Education (HE) systems in European countries. We employ data extracted from the OECD datasets (Education at a Glance, several years), both (1) computing an "overall" Performance Indicator and (2) using a non-parametric technique...