Auditing the efficiency of the nation-funded social science research with data envelopment analysis

Abstract

The efficiency of the nation-funded social science research has become one of the main interests in university administration and performance auditing organization, as a large amount of money has been devoted to supporting the development of social science research in the form of project funding. This paper aims to address the efficiency evaluation difficulties in a performance auditing by means of multi-inputs and multi-outputs, together with an improved multi-period data envelopment analysis model with feedback effect based on the facts that parts of the outputs of the previous year act as important inputs of the current year. Then with the help of this performance auditing method, the efficiencies and their changes of the nation-funded social science research implemented by universities in Jiangsu Province for the period 2011–2015 are examined via a two-stage production process that separates development and innovation. The application conclusion can shed light on the respective operation to detect the lower efficiency stages or years for each university.

Keywords:

• Performance auditing
• efficiency
• data envelopment analysis
• two-stage with feedback system
• Malmquist productivity index

Acknowledgments

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The authors are grateful to Professor Joe Zhu for his suggestions and comments on earlier versions of the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 http://www.intosai.org/issai-executive-summaries/view/article/issai-3000-standards-and-guidelines-for-performance-auditing-based-on-intosais-auditing-standar.html (similarly hereinafter).

2 http://www.chinadegrees.cn/xwyyjsjyxx/xwsytjxx/; http://www.ec.js.edu.cn/col/col4065/index.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71828101, 71873030 and 71704023) as well as the Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (Grant No.2015SJB201).