THE MEASUREMENT OF PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN EGYPTIAN UNIVERSITIES USING DEA-BASED MALMQUIST PRODUCTIVITY INDEX

The purpose of this paper is to measure productivity growth of the Egyptian universities for the period 2006/2007 to 2011/2012 in addition, focus on the investigation of the causes of productivity change and on its decomposition. Productivity is measured by a nonparametric approach known as DEA-based Malmquist productivity index and defined as the ratio between efficiency, as calculated by the data envelopment analysis (DEA), for the same production unit in two different time periods. The DEA-based Malmquist productivity index can be decomposed into two components, one measuring the change in efficiency and the other measuring the change in the frontier technology. Over the period of the study, Malmquist productivity has risen by an annual average of 3.7%, and this has been caused by a combination of positive annual average technology change (4.3%) and small negative annual average technical efficiency change (0.5%). The results suggest that universities in Egypt have been able to achieve productivity improvement by becoming technologically advanced, despite of the small deterioration in technical efficiency. The small observed regress in technical efficiency is attributed to the regress in managerial efficiency (0.2%) and regression scale efficiency (0.4%).