教育財政における規模の経済性の実証分析

市町村の学校運営費を最小化する学校数と学校規模

抄録

In order to comply with the standard school size required by law, Japanese municipalities have been dividing and consolidating schools as the student population changes. Standard school-size laws require 12–18 classes per school, but lack an empirical basis. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of standard school-size laws from an expenditure perspective and identify the number of schools required to minimize school operating costs. The result shows that there are economies of scale between elementary or junior high school costs and the number of schools or school sizes. Estimations indicate that minimized costs are achieved when there are 103.0 elementary schools and 20.4 junior high schools per municipality, with 521.9 students per elementary school and 555.2 students per junior high school. These results lead us to the conclusion that (1) a shift to a broader education administration area would be desirable for fiscal efficiency and (2) these numbers are coherent with the school-size laws. The confirmation of this point is one of the important contributions of this study.