During the home confinement caused by COVID-19, universities closed and all teaching became virtual, testing the sustainability of the education system. A total of 3080 Spanish university students participated in a survey to analyse how they have adapted to this situation, whether there has been a digital divide and how they have followed training activities. The results reveal that households have had to invest in ICT equipment and universities have offered support to vulnerable students. Students were not prepared for this change, found it difficult to follow the course online, spent more hours per day studying and achieved lower academic performance. Higher education institutions must ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education that reduces the digital divide, promoting sustainable activities.

Higher education must include training in sustainability to make all actors aware of the serious problems our planet is facing. Mathematics plays an important role in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and at the same time these allow working with real situations in the subject of mathematics, providing the student with active learning. Sustainability is used to make the student see the usefulness of mathematics while instilling values and attitudes towards it. A set of problems have been raised during the academic year that are solved with the developed mathematical techniques, and through a survey, the students’ perceptions about the usefulness of mathematics to reach the goals established in the SDG has been evaluated. The results show that, regardless of the student’s gender, the student’s assessment of the usefulness of this subject in solving real problems improved. It has been observed that this teaching methodology has helped to motivate students and even those who do not like this subject have improved their appreciation of it.

The aim of this paper is to determine whether transparency influences efficiency of public services delivery and, therefore, the economic performance of municipal governments. First, and taking into account previous research, we select the appropriate inputs and outputs to calculate efficiency using several nonparametric methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), DEA-boostraping, Free Disposal Hull (FDH), order-m and order-α partial frontiers. Second, the results are related to different variables, with transparency playing a prominent role. In general, transparency influences efficiency, although this sometimes depends on the specific indicator used to measure the latter and on the methodology utilized to calculate it. In particular, our results show that the greater the economic and financial transparency and the more information there is on public service contracts and on urban planning and public works, the more efficient the municipality is, i.e. the more optimally the scarce resources of public administrations are managed. This is relevant for policy makers, as they have to implement policies that make administrations more transparent, which will facilitate the supervision of both users of services and upper governmental authorities (regional/central).

Environmental education is one of the most effective means of raising public awareness of the need to preserve the environment, and therefore plays a key role in raising awareness and conserving the environment. Teachers also play an important role in achieving these sustainable objectives. Economic decisions are intimately linked to and affect the sustainable development to a large extent, hence the importance of the subject of economics in achieving sustainability. The minimum contents established by the educational law on these aspects related to sustainability have been revised. Through a survey, the differences in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors related to sustainable development are analyzed from a gender perspective. It is detected that, in general, women have a greater knowledge of environmental issues and more sensitivity, with a greater commitment to recycling and changing lifestyles.

Many studies that assess efficiency in health systems are based on output mean values. That approach ignores the representativeness of the average statistic, which can become a serious problem in estimation. To solve this question, this research contributes in three different ways: the first aim is to evaluate the technical efficiency in the management of European health systems considering a set of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) and FDEA (Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis) models. A second goal is to assess the bias in the estimation of efficiency when applying the conventional DEA. The third objective is the evaluation of the statistical relationship between the bias in the efficiency estimation and the macroeconomic variables (income inequality and economic freedom). The main results show positive correlations between DEA and FDEA scores. Notwithstanding traditional DEA models overestimate efficiency scores. Furthermore, the size of the bias is positively related to income inequality and negative with economic freedom in the countries evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it assesses the efficiency of the drinking water supply in the Spanish municipalities of over 5,000 inhabitants. Second, it examines the hypothesis that this efficiency is conditioned by a group of environmental variables. Unlike monitoring reports based on descriptive methods, this paper uses the double data envelopment analysis bootstrap procedure to ascertain efficiency determinants. The results show that municipalities could improve their efficiency by modifying the scale at which they are operating. Regarding the determinants of efficiency, population density has been found to have a positive effect on the level of efficiency in the public service covered by this study. Moreover, it is shown that most tourist municipalities are more efficient at managing water supply service. These findings also suggest that there is greater efficiency when the provision of drinking water is managed directly by the local government. Finally, no significant impact of citizens’ level of income, political ideology, and strength on drinking water supply efficiency is found.