Determining scale and scope economies in Korean private universities: an input distance function approach

Over the past few decades, South Korea has prioritized higher education to boost knowledge-based economic development. This study investigates Korean private universities’ scale and scope economies using several input/output variables and employs them using a stochastic frontier analysis of the input distance function. As our dataset does not comprise price-based information, the duality approach between the cost and input distance functions enables us to use our data directly to test ray- and product-specific scale and scope economies. Our dataset comprises university-level data for 57 private universities from 2011 to 2016. The findings reveal ray-scale and global-scope economies for the sampled universities. Based on these empirical results, we provide several suggestions for future research.