EFFICIENCY AND SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTIVITY IN ITALIAN UNIVERSITIES

Efficiency in Higher Education Systems is an issue of crucial importance these days considering the strong dependence of this sector on public funds. Indeed in the context of the current economic crisis the evaluation of efficiency of education provision is a primary target for governments from a social viewpoint. In this context, this thesis seeks to fill a significant gap in the literature on the Italian higher education system, by looking at issues of efficiency and quality. The thesis consists of three essays. The first paper is strictly related to the estimation of the overall efficiency of Italian Universities during the last decade using appropriate recently introduced (Tsionas, 2002; Greene, 2005) econometric techniques. Efficiency is measured by taking into account the multidimensional nature of academic institutions which -by their nature- involved teaching, research and administrative activities as their primary dimensions. Going deeply into the issue of academics’ efficiency, we should note that the main human capital stock of inputs for both the teaching and research dimensions consists of the academic body. Quality, competences and professionalism of professors are leading “determinants” of teaching and research of our universities. Therefore the selection mechanisms of academics and their recruitment rules gather a great importance in this context. To this purpose we notice that a decentralization of academic selection procedures was introduced in Italy in 1998 with the “Berlinguer reform” act. Second and the third paper of this thesis focus especially on the evaluation of the quality of those individuals who succeeded in competitive examinations to become associate, and full professors, and on the incentives to produce international research associated with different recruitment mechanisms (national versus local).