This paper extends the theory of inverse frontier-based benchmarking to address the issue of effectiveness when investigating the efficiency of household expenditure in the case of the Vietnamese education system. Enhancing the conventional efficiency measurement approach by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), our study focuses on the derivation of meaningful benchmarks – in terms of the required level of inputs and outputs – for performance improvement. The proposed inverse optimization problem identifies the essential household education expenditures for 63 provincial education systems at different efficiency levels while the university entrance threshold for exam results is satisfied as an effectiveness constraint. The results strongly recommend including this constraint into the action plans of improving the educational achievements in all provinces across Vietnam. Besides revealing policy implications in the specific case, the proposed approach adds to current DEA literature by suggesting complementary measures such as effectiveness and feasibility to strengthen performance assessment.

本文扩展了基于逆边界的基准化理论，以解决在调查越南教育系统情况下的家庭支出效率时的有效性问题。通过数据包络分析（DEA）增强了传统的效率度量方法，我们的研究集中在有意义的基准（根据所需的投入和产出水平）的推导上，以提高绩效。提出的逆向优化问题确定了63个省级教育系统在不同效率水平下的基本家庭教育支出，同时满足考试成绩的大学入学门槛作为有效性约束。结果强烈建议将此限制因素纳入改善越南各省教育成绩的行动计划中。除了揭示特定案例中的政策含义外，所提出的方法还通过建议补充措施（例如，有效性和可行性）来加强绩效评估，从而增加了DEA的现有文献。