STANDARD COSTS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: THE CASE OF ITALIAN UNIVERSITIES

This paper aims to take into account the use of standard costs as a basis for the financing of public administration in the areas of health, education, municipalities and local public transport in Italy. The most common example of using standard cost accounting is represented by the public administration since standard cost accounting is the criterion for controlling public expenditure adopted by the Court of Auditors. The main principle that drives reforms on the Standard Costs in the Public Administration believes that it is more appropriate to ask for more sacrifices to those who spend more than what is necessary. For this reason the intention of the Government is to adjust the costs of all the regions to the most virtuous standard in order to avoid wastes, that in many cases seem to be unjustified. The focus of this paper is mainly on university education, for which, in fact, the Italian Interministerial Decree No. 893 of December 9, 2014 has provided directives through which it is possible to calculate the cost that each Italian university should support for a student enrolled and ongoing with his own years of study. In light of the fact that the Ordinary Financial Fund (i.e. Fondo di Finanziamento Ordinario, FFO) allocated to the Italian Universities for the year 2014 was composed of 20% on the basis of standard costs and 80% of the historical share and since the standard costs will represent 100% of the share of FFO only starting from 2018, what will emerge from this study are the Italian universities that will be awarded with higher funding than the previous year and the ones, on the contrary, that will be more penalized. The comparison is made using the formulas provided by the decree with the data of five Italian universities with the same order of magnitude and belonging to five different Italian regions, such as: Verona, Parma, Messina, Pavia and the University of Chieti and Pescara. A further comparison is made with foreign universities, in order to point out the position in which Italy stands at world level with regard to university education in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) and the sources of financing made available to the universities.