Public Universities: a new governance approach to achieve financial sustainability

Actually public universities are significantly influenced by the national government policies (for system of funding, staff recruitment, purchasing procedures and performance evaluation processes) and that makes these organizations not sufficiently adaptive to changes in their environment. However, after a long academic debate and an unexpected and shorter legislative process the Italian Government (Law 240/2010, Legislative Decree 18/2012 and Decree of Ministry of Education and Research 19/2014) requires public universities to adopt a “business-style” model of governance and accounting (for both budgeting and financial reporting). The ultimate goal of this paper is to verify whether the process of legislative change may improve decision making processes and sustainability of universities sector.