Heterogeneity of national accounting systems, world-class universities and financial resources: What are the links?

This study investigates the relationship between university financial resources, applied accounting systems, and the place of a university in the Shanghai Ranking. We find a strong relationship between the financial resources under the control of a world-class university and the position of that university in the highest tier of the global ranking. We propose a model (available online) to predict a university’s tier in the ranking through the financial resources it employs. A critical condition for making a university a world-class university could be to provide it with a sufficiently high level of financial resources, and its efficiency could play an important leverage role. In view of the results, policymakers are challenged with a drastic choice: to increase international competition among universities, it is necessary to concentrate a huge amount of resources on a few universities that are already in the ranking. In contrast, the policy of the proportional distribution of resources does not affect international competition and may be inefficient. Furthermore, financial data are not easy to gather homogeneously for universities across countries, due to the existence of different national accounting systems. Finally, we discuss several critical issues associated with the measurement of specific accounting data of universities.