The Beijing Forum 2012 is an international event co-sponsored by Peking University, Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, and the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies.

Jill’s paper, 'Measuring efficiency and input substitutability: Evidence from the English higher education sector over a period of expansion', dealt with issues concerning resource allocation in the higher education sector in the current climate of public funding cuts.

Using the English higher education sector as a case study, she first investigated, using frontier estimation methods, the scope for absorbing cost cuts in efficiency savings. Whilst the results, based on a 13-year period, suggested considerable scope for more efficient resource utilization amongst the worst performing institutions, a worrying result for policy-makers was that the precise efficiency levels and rankings of universities were sensitive to the method of estimation.

In a second stage of the paper, Jill examined the effect on efficiency of university merger (of which there were around 20 over the period). Based on a crude comparison of mean efficiency of pre-merger, post-merger and non-merging institutions, she found that post-merger universities were typically more efficient than either pre- or non-merging ones, and this result was consistent across all methods of estimation. Whether or not this was a consequence of the actual merger or of inter-institutional differences in some other underlying characteristics requires further research. But preliminary results from the work suggested that pre-merging institutions were much more flexible in their ability to substitute between inputs than either post- or non-merging ones. It is therefore likely that the merging institutions in the sample had particularly favourable characteristics which led both to the merger itself and to the increased efficiency after the merger. Thus it may well be that enforced merger between universities which do not display these characteristics will not yield the same results in terms of increased efficiency. While the work is based on the English higher education sector, it is clearly of policy relevance to policy-makers in all countries.

Following the presentation of her paper, Jill hopes to take up invitations from Peking University and Beijing Normal University to return to Beijing to speak further on the issue of efficiency measurement in higher education.