Child Care Service Quality Management Through the Evaluation of Efficiency at Child Care Centers: An Evaluation with Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper proposes a scheme to estimate the technical efficiency at child care centers for the less‐than‐three‐year‐old infants by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and to manage the quality of care service through implementing flexible and efficient government subsidy system. The result of technical efficiency estimation shows that there exists the heterogeneity in technical efficiency a substantial opportunity for improvement in technical efficiency across child care centers. This result implies that government may bring up the competition by giving subsidy differentially based on efficiency and use the money which has been used inefficiently other purposes. Both can improve the quality of child care service.