Assessing the impact of performance-based budgeting on Italian Higher Education recruitment policy
In the last thirty years, the Italian Higher Education System has faced a long and wide-ranging process of reforms inspired by quasi-market and performance budgeting intended to improve the overall performances. While these tools were aimed to change university strategies to achieve better performances, they may lead to unexpected effects (gaming policies or winner-takes-all effect).
This work focuses on the impact produced by the adoption in 2012 of a formula-based mechanism to allocate the recruitment budget to Italian universities. This work aims to identify how the composition of Universities’ personnel changed in the last years, with a specific focus on what occurred after the 2012. For this purpose, a longitudinal analysis was carried out using open data provided by the Ministry of Education. Furthermore, variations in resources allocated to each university and to each different geographical area were analysed. Lastly, professor body composition for each university has been investigated (either aggregate and by type). Results show heterogeneity throughout the country and also suggest that universities’ geographical localisation resources allocation is influenced by geographical localisation of the universities.
Keywords: Higher education, performance-based budgeting, punti organico, quasi-market
