School Performance and the Education Systems' Efficiency: An International Comparison Based on OECD Pisa Surveys

Public expenditure on education has long been considered, through the accumulation of human capital, as a factor of the efficiency of educational policies. Nevertheless, empirical evidence shows that for an equal level of investment, the returns of education systems differ from one country to another. Several factors are involved. Corruption is increasingly being examined. Indeed, corruption has two facets: a direct effect through influencing students' motivation and an indirect one through mismanagement of public expenditure. A hierarchical clustering analysis and a repeated analysis of variance of a data taken from the OECD PISA surveys indicate that classifying countries as low or high performance countries is a function of their rank on the corruption perception index.