Scale Economies in Public Vocational Education: Empirical Evidence from Thailand

Abstract

The paper investigates the sources of scale economies in the production of public vocational education based on cross-sectional data from 411 vocational schools in Thailand. An empirical analysis is made of the relationship among the following factors: the cost per student, the number of student enrollments, school quality, discretionary allocation of staffing resources, and regional variation affecting demand for public vocational education. It appears that close to 80 per cent of the public vocational schools in Thailand are too small a size to have economies of scale for optimal average cost efficiencies. Thai education public policy should emphasize enrollment expansion of existing vocation schools in order to fulfill the national education policy to sustain the need of the current labor demand as well as in pursuit of cost efficiency.