Decentralization of educational services and service quality

The aim of the thesis, in order to increase the quality of education services, is to examine trends in decentralization of education services, and to investigate whether there is a relationship between decentralization of education services and the overall service quality in the selected countries. The primary hypothesis sentence is ?under certain circumstances, decentralization of education services has a positive effect on the service quality.? The thesis evaluates educational services and its features in general, and discusses factors that increase the quality and efficiency of education services. The thesis examines the case of decentralization in education with its causes, possible drawbacks, and considerations. Furthermore, it investigates decentralized educational services in the world; and evaluates theoretically the necessary decentralization prerequisites. At the latest section of the thesis, it identifies the relationship between decentralization of education services and service quality, with the help of theoretical-empirical evidence from the scientific literature, as well as the specific analysis method belonging to this thesis. For the first time, international level, decentralization coefficients used in the analysis was derived from the Pisa school survey data. This is an important contribution of the thesis. In this way, the relationship between decentralization of education services and service quality has been analyzed with the method described in fourth section, as far as can be determined for the first time in the scientific literature. Using the supporting theoretical and empirical evidence, the thesis investigates the decentralization topic with the question that how it should be the decentralization of education services. As a result, theoretical evidence of this MA thesis has supported its empirical findings, and the initial basic assumption was confirmed.