Education is acknowledged for having a positive impact upon the economic, social, political and demographic sectors. Education is the core of the factors that improved people for a better lifestyle and increases the level of society’ development. Quality education is one of the most important goals of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study assesses education sector’s efficiency of the analyzed 30 European countries bearing in mind the characteristics related to SDGs using relational network data envelopment analysis (DEA).

The contribution of this study is the use of a novel approach to computing the educational economy efficiency for the year 2022 using relational network DEA, which have three interrelated substages under the assumption of the constant return to scale and output-oriented. The input and output variables were adapted to each particular level of education. The idea is to subdivide the system into 3 subsystems (primary education, secondary education and tertiary education) linked by intermediate variables. The input variables, intermediate products and outputs are Government expenditure per pupil, primary (% of GDP), Pisa science performance (mean), Government expenditure per pupil, secondary (% of GDP), Employment rate for upper secondary level, Government expenditure per pupil, tertiary (% of GDP per capita), Employment rate for tertiary level. Efficiency appears to be achieved when education results, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment scores or other value-added outcomes, are reached with rather low levels of financial resources. The results show that most countries have lower education efficiency scores. The resulting efficiency scores demonstrate an important similarity between the efficiency of the entire education system and the efficiency of primary and secondary education. This result confirms that the inefficiency of education in the analyzed countries is mainly due to the inefficiency of secondary education. The most efficient countries are Romania, Bulgaria, Ireland and Hungary as they are quite efficient in the substages as well.