Input Rigidities and Performance of Vietnamese Universities

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Carolyn–Dung T. T. Tran,Renato A. Villano
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/asej.12124
• Date: 01 September 2017

Input Rigidities and Performance of Vietnamese

Universities*

Carolyn–Dung T. T. Tran and Renato A. Villano

Received 24 February 2016; Accepted 28 July 2017

Universities in Vietnam are inclined to have an inefficient mix of input resources

because of rigidities restricting the adoption of advanced teaching technology.

There has been a deferral of the adoption of new teaching technologies to meet

the rest of the world’s higher education standards. Using an input-orientated data

envelopment analysis (DEA) method, technical, scale and mix efficiency indica-

tors are estimated for 112 Vietnamese universities over the period 2011–2013

using the Färe–Primont index. The results indicate that the technical, scale and

mix efficiency indicators are 0.784, 0.866 and 0.829, respectively. Using the frac-

tional regression model, it is found that location, age, ownership and financial

capacity have significant influences on the mix efficiency indicators of universities.

Keywords: data envelopment analysis, Färe–Primont index,fractional regression,

input technical, scale and mix efficiencies, universities.

JEL classification codes: C61, D24, I23.

doi: 10.1111/asej.12124

I. Introduction

Promoting efficiency in economic sectors, including manufacturing and services

industries, is necessary to improve national competitiveness. Higher education

plays a crucial role in this process because of its contribution to the capacity of

a nation to compete with the rest of the world. In terms of the importance of

financial resources and the demand for re-evaluating educational reform policies,

it is imperative for policy-makers to examine the efficiency of input resources

used by universities while making efforts to maintain and improve the quality of

education (Castano and Cabanda, 2007; Agasisti and Pohl, 2012; Sav, 2012).

As in the majority of developing nations, enhancing higher education stan-

dards is among the most important strategies being used by Vietnam to enhance

*Tran (corresponding author): UNE Business School, University of New England, Armidale,

NSW 2351, Australia. Email: ttran43@une.edu.au. Villano: UNE Business School, University of

New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia; Email: rvillan2@une.edu.au. We are grateful for the

comments and suggestions made by the editor and the anonymous referee. We also appreciate the

valuable suggestions and editorial comments made by Adjunct Professor George E. Battese on this

paper.

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its competitiveness with other nations. After nearly two decades of implement-

ing the educational socialization strategy introduced in 1997, Vietnam has

achieved remarkable increases in the number of universities and the number of

university enrolments. During the period 2011–2013, the number of university

enrolments was over 1.4 million, an increase of 99.5 percent over the number of

university enrolments in 1999/2000. Likewise, the number of graduates who

completed their degree was also over 300 000, which was 2.5 times higher than

that of for the 1999/2000 academic year. This growth in the number of universi-

ties and enrolments has made a significant contribution to providing highly-

qualified labor for the national economy and improving the educational level of

society. However, whether this growth is significant remains to be examined. In

a recent global competitiveness report (Schwab, 2013), Vietnam was ranked

95th among the 148 selected nations in the world in terms of higher education

and training. This raises specific concerns about whether the universities in Viet-

nam are efficient in their operations in the face of a changing educational envi-

ronment and whether contextual factors are influencing their operational

efficiencies.

In recent years, several studies have been published on the efficiency of Viet-

namese higher education. Nguyen et al. (2015) applied a conventional DEA

model to measure the technical efficiencies of 30 doctorate-granting universities

in Vietnam for the academic year 2012/2013. They conducted various sensitivity

analyses and estimated eight different models using different inputs and outputs.

The input variables used were space and number of staff and the output vari-

ables were enrolments, student numbers and total income. Then, they divided

the input of staff into doctoral and non-doctoral staff, the outputs of enrolments

and total students into bachelor, master and PhD degrees, respectively, and com-

bined the number of inputs and outputs in different models. The results indi-

cated that the efficiencies of the 30 universities ranged from 0.812 to 0.921 for

the eight models. They stated that the aggregation of variables generated an

average lower efficiency and, thus, reduced the chances of universities being

selected as efficient units. Nguyen et al. (2015) used a small sample size relative

to the number of inputs and outputs used; thus, the discriminative power of the

analysis is questionable. Likewise, the environmental factors that can influence

the level of efficiency of universities were examined in Nguyen et al. To address

some of these limitations, Tran and Villano (2017) used a sample size of

100 higher education institutions (HEI), including 50 universities and 50 colleges

in 2011/2012, to measure the efficiency of higher education in Vietnam and to

examine the effects of environmental factors on the performance of HEI. Using

the semiparametric two-stage DEA with bootstrapping to generate more robust

estimates and solve the serial correlation of estimated efficiency and the cor rela-

tion between error terms and environmental factors, their findings indicated that

the bootstrapped efficiencies of universities and colleges are on average 0.960

and 0.939, respectively, which are higher than the results of Nguyen

et al. (2015). The variables for location, age and the contribution of tuition fees

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