Abstract
Inspired by their analysis of universities’ efficiency, Agasisti and Ricca (Ital Econ 2(1):57–89, 2016) on this Journal make a controversial policy proposal on the financing of private universities in Italy. We point out a number of shortcomings in their empirical analysis, interpretation of results and suggestions of policy implications. We show that Agasisti and Ricca’s claims, that universities in the South and public universities are less efficient than private universities and universities in the North, do not rest on solid empirical and conceptual analysis.
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Notes
We do not refer here to students’ productivity, because as explained in the next section we do not share the view that students should be considered as inputs in universities’ production process. However, the statistical correlation between the number of enrolled students and universities’ efficiency scores (if it was not computed including students among the inputs) could nonetheless denote economies of scale, in so far as the number of students is positively correlated with the number of university staff and the value of revenues and costs.
While in the private sector, firm size is often found to correlate with innovation and R&D activities (for the case of Italy, see Cebula and Rossi 2015), anecdotal evidence and newspaper reports usually identify the larger, public universities with the least efficiency. For this reason, ANVUR’s first research assessment exercise (the Valutazione Triennale della Ricerca, VTR 2001–2003) already produced separate university rankings, dividing Italy’s universities into three size groups.
For a discussion of the role of public and private production of goods and services in recent Italian economic thought, see Biasco (2016).
AR exclude from their sample all online (“telematiche”) universities, but since their policy proposal would apparently benefit them as well, or else we do not see on what basis they would be excluded from an allocation of funding on mere efficiency terms, we decided to keep them in the analysis.
References
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), grant # INO1500040.
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We wish to thank Alessandro Roncaglia for the initial suggestion of considering the widespread use among private universities of adjunct faculty who often work as tenured professors in public ones, as a form of potentially distortionary cost competition. The authors remain the sole responsible for all remaining errors and the usual disclaimers apply.
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D’Ippoliti, C., Zacchia, G. On the Efficiency of Italian Universities: A Comment. Ital Econ J 3, 113–123 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-016-0042-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40797-016-0042-y