No, this value alone does not tell you much. Consider a diagonal matrix like the following:
d 0 0 0
0 d 0 0
0 0 d 0
0 0 0 d
d
is an arbitrary number.
This matrix is essentially the homogeneous equivalent of the identity matrix and does not perform any transformation at all. The uniform scaling part in the upper left 3x3 block is cancelled out by the perspective divide. You can always multiply the matrix by the inverse of the m33
entry to somewhat normalize it (this will preserve the transformation). For the above matrix, you would then get:
1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 1
And in this form, you can easily see that it is the identity. Moreover, you can examine the upper left 3x3 block to find out if there is a scaling (depending on your definition of scaling, calculating the determinant of the 3x3 block and checking for 1 is one option as Robert mentioned in the comments).