中文4160字本科毕业论文（设计）外 文 翻 译原文：A Cost Function for Higher Education in Australia(extract)1. IntroductionThis study estimates a cost function for higher education in Australian universities. The estimated function is used to examine the cost of providing higher education to overseas students. In the higher education sector, production functions are useful for evaluating the structure of the industry and can serve as guides for individual institutions on policies affecting their size and scope. Moreover, in view of the relaxation of provisions under which universities can provide higher education to full-fee paying domestic students, information from cost functions can assist institutions to develop appropriate pricing strategies.Cost functions also provide an opportunity to evaluate the cost of providing higher education to overseas students. Higher education costs for an individual university can be established from a detailed accounting exercise in which the explicit and implicit costs allocated to courses and levels are collected. However, in obtaining the costs of overseas students, there is still be a need for a cost function because it is necessary to examine what the costs would be under alternative student numbers, that is, with and without overseas students. Some idea of the variation in costs with different numbers can be obtained by comparing universities at the same date but with different student profiles. Hence the use of cost functions provides a method for measuring the net benefits(or costs)of the providing education to overseas students.The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews some of the previous work done on the Australian higher education sector and discusses some relevant issues. Section 3 presents the basic cost function model, describes the data and presents empirical results. Section 4 presents results from the application of the cost function, including the costs predictions for the provision of higher education for overseas students. Section 5 draws policy implications and conclusions.2. Previous Work and Some IssuesThrosby (1986)estimated the cost of providing higher education using data from 18 Australian universities for the period 1978 to 1982.This was followed by Lloyd et al.(1993) and Lloyd(1994),which defined the conditions under which the functional form of the cost function allows economies of scale and scope in the production of multiple outputs, that is research and teaching in various disciplines and at different levels. Estimates from these studies were used to analyse the impact of the amalgamations that followed the 1987 reforms. In particular, the estimated equation was used to evaluate the likely cost savings arising from the amalgamation of two or more institutions. The most recent cost function estimate for Australia is reported in Throsby and Heaton(1995).Using 1991 cross-sectional data on 42 institutions, Throsby and Heaton analysed the relationship between the operating costs of institutions and the number of students in 10 broad subject areas and three levels of studies, using a quadratic function of the student numbers(implying constant marginal costs).Their cost function was used by Baker, Creedy and Johnson(1996)to evaluate the cost of overseas students.A number of issues arise in deriving and using such a model. First, previous studies failed to account for unobserved differences between universities. Each institution has a particular structure that may make the provision of particular courses more cost efficient in one university than in others. In addition, the explanatory variables chosen may not adequately represent the characteristics of particular institutions; for example, there may be variation of quality and the proportion of resources devoted to research. The implicit assumption that quality of teaching is independent of variations in student numbers is also made. Second, there are aggregation problems associated with the accurate specification of the variables. These occur because the choice of discipline or course level categories masks large differences between components of the aggregated discipline. For example, health includes the training of both high-cost doctors and relatively low-cost nurses. At the aggregate level they may be combined into a single composite group, but individual universities may specialise in either the high-cost or the low-cost product. Accordingly, their total costs will be under-or over-estimated by the use of an averaged set of parameters defined over the universities as a whole.Third, the conventional cost minimisation assumption does not apply naturally to the higher education sector when government (to a large extent)determines both the funding and the output. In fact, many universities may use the same model as used by the government to determine the funding of domestic students (the Relative Funding Model)for setting fees for overseas students.In general, the first