The decade of the 90's has seen a remarkably consistent worldwide reform agenda for the finance and management of universities and other institutions of higher education. What is remarkable about the consistency is that there are very similar patterns in countries with dissimilar political-economic systems and higher educational traditions, and at extremely dissimilar stages of industrial and technological development. Thus, there seem to be similarities among countries greatly disparate in wealth and in political-economic systems. And there are similarities in the reform agendas of countries whose higher education systems are elite and universal, predominantly public or private, or relatively wealthy or staggering under austerity. This review is an attempt to assess the status of this worldwide reform agenda in the late 1990s, in anticipation of the first years of the next millennium. This financial and management reform agenda can be viewed in five themes: a) expansion and diversification; b) fiscal pressure; c) orientation to the market; d) accountability; and e) quality and efficiency.

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The financing and management of higher education : a status report on worldwide reforms

This article proposes an approach to answering two questions: first, does investment in education help growth; second, does the allocation of investment in education matter? I develop a model where individual ability is heterogeneous and education both trains students and reveals their suitability for further training. I use UNESCO data on educational enrollments and spending to estimate the efficiency of existing educational allocations in a panel of countries. A cross-country growth decomposition regression shows that the correlation of human capital capital accumulation and GDP growth is not significant in countries with poor allocations but is significant and positive in countries with better allocations.

Economic Growth and Investment in Education: How Allocation Matters

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Revisiting Urban Planning in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article reports the results of a study of scholarly publishing in Spanish-speaking Latin America today. It draws on 230 surveys on journal publishing and nine journal publishing workshops, as well as on interviews and additional meetings conducted in 2007 and 2008 with a wide range of stakeholders in scholarly publishing (including editors, university publishers, and national science foundation directors) from 11 Latin American countries. The results suggest that the principal challenges faced by those involved in scholarly publishing in Latin America are establishing and maintaining the long-term sustainability of the journals, and achieving greater visibility for, and improving the quality of, published work, with an eye to increasing the contribution of these publications in ways that may yet be able to balance both regional and global interests.

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Marcela Mollis

Papers

Higher Education in Latin American

Institutional Reform in Mexican Higher Education: Conflict and Renewal in Three Public Universities