国立総合大学における内部資源配分の現状と考察

According to interviews on internal resource allocation models (RAMs) with representatives from ten Japanese comprehensive national universities, the following facts were revealed. Firstly, annual departmental budgets tend to be decided by institutional central offices with rather formulaic approaches and with no official process to respond to departmental requests. However, departments tend to be able to use allocated budgets at their full discretion. Secondly, the categorization of universities (research-led, strong in specific fields and regionally contributing) launched by Japanese Ministry of Education (the MEXT) since the beginning of the third management cycle (FY2016-2021) did not have a significant influence on their RAMs.
However, this policy tool reduced each universityʼs block grant by 0.8-1.6% every year. Under such circumstances, more than a few universities cut the same rate of departmental budgets for research. Thirdly, the redistribution of the block grant among the universities with the assessment of the common performance metrics had a strong influence on their RAMs. All the universities introduced similar budget redistribution schemes with the same metrics internally. However, some universities set a small portion of their departmental budget aside and redistributed it to their departments based on performance metrics. Others did not set it aside and simply added a part of their presidential discretionary budget to specific departments based on the metrics. Overall, this redistribution of the block grant was unpopular since it was suddenly introduced in the middle of the universitiesʼ management cycle, and intruded on institutional budgetary affairs.
Based on two qualitative comparative analyses (QCA), the following facts were revealed. The universities with comparative advantage in terms of their scale, public resource dependency and research competitiveness have leeway to set a part of departmental budget aside for their internal redistribution and to have more realistic departmental budget formulae responding to departmental demands. However, those with comparative disadvantage do not have leeway to do the same things. All in all, the current block grant redistribution schemes with institutional performance may widen institutional disparities among Japanese national universities.