Investigation of the country-specific factors for URAP

Abstract

The international rankings of universities have a significant impact on the perception of academics, students, governments, and businesses towards the universities. The aim of the study is to identify country-specific factors that are thought to influence academic performance and to reveal how the country-specific factors should be developed for universities to increase their success. For this purpose, the University Ranking by Academic Performance index for universities in 103 countries covering the period 2013-2019 was taken as the dependent variable to represent academic performance. The index value used as the dependent variable was constituted by taking the average of the country to which entered the ranking universities belong. The country-specific factors were taken as the political stability and absence of violence/terrorism, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the economic freedom index, the university-industry collaboration in research & development index, and the gross domestic product per capita. The factors affecting the academic performance of universities were analyzed with spatial panel data methods and the findings revealed that the rule of law, the university-industry collaboration, and the GDP per capita increase academic performance.