Os indicadores de desempenho instituídos pelo TCU para as Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior: análise empírica do período de 2008 a 2010,

Abstract

The Public Management has incorporated best management practices by the focus on efficient results and transparent management. The use of performance indicators plays a fundamental role to mirror the real situation of the entity and its possibilities for improvement. In the specific case of federal universities, the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU) has established a set of nine indicators to be measured by these units and disseminated through their management reports. The difficulty of interpretation arising from viewing, simultaneously, all assessment criteria contained in this set and their interdependencies, generated the development of this research. The study analyzes and summarizes this set of indicators, relating to 53 federal universities, for the years 2008 to 2010, so as to identify a model simplification to assist internal and external controls. The methodology used is the factor analysis, a multivariate statistical technique of interdependence, and didn t explore in previous research about this theme, in addition to tests of linear regression and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), this one already widely used in the literature, in order to be able to ratify the associations and interpretations of the results. Tests showed satisfactory adhesion of the technique to data collected, allowing indentify two factors that could explain 61.8% of the original information set. With ratification of the DEA, these factors were associated with performance and cost, and the relationship between them was interpreted as an index of efficiency. The factor tied to the performance was titled summarized indicator to the entire set established by TCU, and had high and significant correlation with the Ranking Universitário Folha, showing that they have similar discriminating power, even though it was derived from distinct calculation bases. Moreover, the following additional results can be highlighted: 1) Although the cost has influence on the performance of the federal universities, it is not dominant, but indicators of engagement with postgraduate and teachers` qualification are more relevant; 2) Indicators result not suffer much influence from the cost, especially the human resources (employees), showing that in general there is inefficiency in the staff management of the universities; 3) The use of DEA showed that the choice of variables can actually lead to different results and not significantly correlated, what is a limitation about the certification of efficiency scores obtained.