Efficiency of Public Expenditure on Education in Benin: A Comparative Analysis with the Countries of WAEMU

This paper analyzes the efficiency of public expenditure on education in Benin from 2000 to 2020. Using a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, the paper calculates the efficiency of public expenditure on education for Benin as well as for the other countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) in order to highlight the differences in the efficiency of the use of public resources in education. The paper uses public expenditure on education as an input and the gross enrolment ratio in primary school, the primary school completion rate and the gross tertiary enrolment ratio as outputs for the DEA model. The results indicate that the efficiency score of public expenditure on education in Benin is 0.88. This shows that there is a high degree of efficiency in education. Nevertheless, this result indicates that there is room for improvement in the efficiency of public expenditure on education of 12% for Benin. Also, a comparison of Benin’s efficiency score with those of the other WAEMU countries shows that Benin’s score is outstripped by Togo’s (0.93) and Guinea-Bissau’s (0.95). The efficiency scores for Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are estimated at 0.68, 0.67, 0.58, 0.56 and 0.51 respectively. The paper suggests that in WAEMU, Benin could draw inspiration from the management of public expenditure on education in Togo and Guinea-Bissau to better identify best practices and policies to improve the efficiency of its public expenditure on education.