An empirical investigation into the technical efficiency of public universities in Nigeria through a non-parametric technique

Nigeria’s Public universities massively depend on government funding to run their affairs. However, the funding continuously becomes scarcer as the universities continuously growing in relation to student enrolments and establishments of new departments and faculties. It becomes a concern to the government about how these universities utilise their resources and do their goals really delivered as expected? Therefore, this paper uses the prevailing non-parametric technique (DEA) mostly used for efficiency analysis of public institutions with multiple inputs and outputs (example, universities) to investigate the technical efficiency of Nigerian public universities from 2007/2008 to 2011/2012. The result shows that 2 universities out of the total of 18 are found to be technically efficient for the whole 5 years observed while 6 universities have never been efficient in any of the 5 years. Policy recommendation is given to the government for making the efficiency index as a yardstick toward fund allocation, hence, this encourages a favourable competition among the universities to be efficient enough in discharging their duties of teaching and research as expected.