Funding, equity, and efficiency of higher education are three dimensions of higher education that have been of increasing interest to scholars and policy-makers during the past two decades in Europe and elsewhere. Analysing these phenomena and the relations between them is the main topic of this paper, considering the funding system as the basic issue. The paper presents each of three phenomena using a joint approach (definition of the phenomenon, its measurement, prevailing global world trends) and endeavours to explore the possibilities of measuring their mutual relationships. (Contains 1 figure and 10 notes.)