AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS AFFECTING EFFICIENCY OFNIGRIA’S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.

The factors that influence the efficiency or otherwise of universities are often been overlooked by most of the university efficiency studies. Those factors are not included in the inputs-outputs analysis and are sometimes referred to as external or environmental factors. The massive dependent on government for university’s fund in Nigeria causes some external factors which are affecting the Nigerian public universities especially staff strike actions. Therefore, this paper uses DEA which is the mostly accepted technique of analyzing efficiency of public institutions and universities in order to investigate the technical efficiency of 18 public universities in Nigeria from 2007/2008 to 2011/2012 academic years. Thispaper forges ahead to the second stage DEA to determine the effect of external factors on the efficiency of those universities using the tobit model. The DEA result shows very low efficiency scores of the universities where only 2 universities are found to be technically efficient for the whole 5 years observed and 6 universities have never attained efficiency in any of the years. At 5% level of significance, the tobit regression outcome shows that financing the university has a negative effect on the inefficiencies of the universities, thereby suggesting a boost of the government funding based on performance. Also, size of the universities and staff strike actions both have positive significant effect for been ine?cient but with little magnitude. Larger universities tend to be more inefficient whilestaff strike actions increase the inefficiency rate of the universities. Therefore, funding the universities can tackle the inefficiency caused by strike actions and the universities should be given some autonomy. Also, the universities should generate internal source of funding to complement those fund coming through the government.