The present article deals with a particular aspect (the side of the supply) of one of the two main lines of research in the economics of education (economical aspects of educational systems). It shows the historical evolution, the current state, and the perspectives of development of the economic theories of education supply, covering the period from the early 1960s to the more recent contributions. It argues that the traditional theories of the economics of education (human capital and screening) have not dealt adequately with the supply aspect of education. Later, the concepts and the instruments of microeconomics of the enterprise were mobilized to try and map out the "technology of production of education". The approach to the functions of production of education initially based just on monetary fluxes was not enough to apprehend all the complexity involved in the process of the supply of education. An analysis of more recent texts reveals three promising paths to the development of the theories of the supply of education: (i) inclusion of non-monetary fluxes into the production functions; (ii) taking into account institutional and organizational aspects of the education system, and (iii) improvement of the econometric techniques for the estimation of the production functions. Lastly, the article discusses at more length the first of these paths.
Economics of education; Human capital; Supply of education; Production functions of education