A Eficiência do Ramo da Educação Pré-Escolar no Norte de Portugal – uma Análise da Última Década

Abstract

This work focuses on the preschool education in Portugal. It uses a novel perspective and it achieves original results. This work evaluates the differences between the private sector and the public sector of the Portuguese preschool education. This evaluation was carried out  in  the  municipalities  of  the  North of Portugal for the last ten years. This research concludes that there is a substantial heterogeneity of the efficiency levels in these municipalities. However, on average, the public sector is more efficient than the private sector of the preschool education in the North of Portugal and, also on average, there is less inefficiency when the output is measured by the ratio between the number of children and the number of teachers against the alternative measure composed by the ratio between the number of children and the number of schools.