EFFICIENCY ANALYSIS OF PROVINCIAL DEPARTMENTS OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN IRAN.

In many countries, including Iran, Provincial Departments of Physical Education try to develop the athletic sports and sports for all in their related areas (state), using the government resources. Their success rate has always been an important subject for the top sports managers of country. In this paper we use data envelopment analysis (DEA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) techniques for analyzing the performance of physical education organizations in Iran. Some convex and nonconvex DEA models have been used. Afterwards, we have used the Shannon's entropy for aggregating the results obtained from different models and providing a final efficiency score (FES) and a unified ranking. It can be seen that, in the ranking approach provided in this paper the most productive scale size (MPSS) units have the best rank (see Proposition 1). Our findings reveal that the average of FESs of the states is 0.472635 and 50% of the states have an FES more than this average. Classifying the sates to five efficiency classes, "Excellent, Good, Middle, Weak and Very Weak", the percentage of the states belonging to these classes are 6.7, 30, 16.6, 36.7 and 10, respectively. Also, some correlation and difference studies have been carried out using the Pearson's correlation and student's t-tests. Finally, comparisons between the results of some relevant existing publications and those given in the present paper are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]