Bibliometric Study of the Efficiency of Public Expenditure on Education

Abstract

This bibliometric study analyzes the literature on the efficiency of public education expenditure using two types of bibliometric indicators: quantity (number of publications) and quality (impact by year, author, and journal). These indicators are calculated with worldwide results from the database Scopus from January 2000 to June 2018. The results were classified by author, journal, and publication country focusing on the methodological approach with the aim of identifying research trends in the field. The main results indicate the existence of a growing interest by scholars in the field since 2000, who have used different levels of comparative analysis (cross-country, regional, university, school, and student) and methods (parametric and nonparametric). In addition, nonparametric approaches have been most relevant in recent years thanks to the development of statistical software, their public access, and the possibility to work with a small database, which allows an easy implementation and use of cross-country comparisons. Finally, there is an evident lack of literature analyzing the efficiency of education expenditure in Latin American countries, which opens up a future line of research.