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This article provides a comparative analysis of recent governance reforms in both Finnish and Portuguese higher education institutions (HEIs), following the OECD’s recent reviews of both countries’ tertiary education systems. While in the case of Finland the major problem was identified as being a lack of entrepreneurialism, Portugal was considered to lack effective, strategic higher education planning as well as innovative, flexible and responsive HEIs. The review teams pointed to common issues, despite different country contexts. As they recommended very similar solutions for reforming the legal status of universities, this encouraged national governments to undertake reforms according to their specific needs. By pinpointing problems, the OECD was seen to play an important role in this process and its recommendations proved to be close to the ideas of new public management.
To tackle high and persistent unemployment and thus stave off social exclusion, Ireland needs to further pursue an integrated three-pillar strategy: welfare reform to ensure that work pays; better activation policies to assist labour reallocation across sectors; and a sustained restraint in wages and other business costs to restore international competitiveness. In particular, often building on recent policy initiatives or commitments, this paper recommends reforms to further enhance product-market competition, improve innovation efforts and ameliorate the quality of education, which are key to economic prosperity.
This Working Paper relates to the 2011 OECD Economic Survey of Ireland (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/ireland).
This Working Paper relates to the 2011 OECD Economic Survey of Ireland (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/ireland).
This Working Paper relates to the 2011 OECD Economic Survey of India (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/india)
The student-faculty ratio is of great significance to policy makers and media as a popular measure of education and teaching quality. Due to its simplicity and the availability of data, it is often used in higher education policy for allocating resources and for ranking universities. This is especially so in some European countries which do not have selective admission policies and where universities have to cope with huge numbers of students. However, there is no definition and no empirically validated data for an appropriate student-faculty ratio. To close this gap, we constructed a model with parameters relevant for high quality teaching and education and validated them empirically by conducting a survey among university professors in business administration. The results clearly illustrate that student-faculty ratios are discipline specific and depend whether the university is research or teaching oriented.
Homeownership rates have increased significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. Using micro-econometric decomposition techniques, this paper shows that part of this increase can be explained by changes in the characteristics of households, including age, household structure, income and education. Nevertheless, a significant portion of the change in homeownership rates remains unexplained by shifts in household characteristics, leaving a potential role for public policy in explaining developments in homeownership rates. Panel estimates suggest that the relaxation of down-payment constraints on mortgage loans has increased homeownership rates among credit-constrained households over recent decades, resulting in a rise in the aggregate homeownership rate that is comparable with the impact of population ageing. In countries where tax relief on mortgage debt financing is generous, however, the expansionary impact of mortgage market innovations on homeownership is smaller. This is consistent with the tendency for such housing tax relief to be capitalised into real house prices, which may crowd-out some financially constrained households from homeownership at the margin. The impact of housing policies regulating the functioning of the rental market, such as rent regulation and provisions for tenure security, on tenure choice is also explored.
JEL classification: R21, R31, G21, H24.
Keywords: Housing markets, homeownership, mortgage markets, financial regulation, taxation.
Residential mobility is closely tied to the functioning of housing markets and has important implications for labour mobility and the efficient allocation of resources across the economy. This paper analyses patterns of residential mobility across OECD countries and the role of housing policies in enhancing or hampering residential mobility. Based on cross-sectional household data for 25countries, the results suggest that differences in residential mobility across countries are partially related to differences in public policies. After controlling for household and country- specific characteristics, residential mobility is higher in countries with lower transaction costs, more responsive housing supply, lower rent controls and tenant protection. Residential mobility tends also to be higher in environments with greater access to credit, suggesting that financial deregulation – by lowering borrowing costs and facilitating access to mortgage finance – facilitates mobility. This cross- country evidence is supported by city and state-level evidence for the United States.
JEL classification: R23, R31, R21, R38, H20.
Keywords: Housing markets, residential mobility, transaction costs, rental market regulations
Smaller universities may produce research which is on a par with larger, elite establishments. This is confirmed by a recently developed mathematical model, supported by data from British and French higher education research-evaluation exercises. The detailed nature of the UK system, in particular, allows quantification of the notion of critical mass in research. It is shown that research quality increases with group quantity, but only up to a limiting size referred to as the upper critical mass. The condition for smaller universities to produce top-quality research is that they contain research groups of sizes above the upper critical masses appropriate to their respective disciplines. Policies which concentrate support into progressively fewer, larger institutions are therefore unjustified for high-quality academic research. Instead, to amplify overall research strength, support for medium-sized groups should be prioritised to help them attain upper critical mass.
Academic staff in Ukraine face a convergence of institutional and professional pressures precipitated by a national economic crisis, projected declines in enrolment and dramatic changes to institutional procedures as institutions implement the Bologna Process. This article examines the extent to which these pressures are reshaping the way academic staff engage in their day-to-day work, their careers and their role in their university. Findings indicate that faculty are caught in a confluence of conflicting demands that elicits adaptive coping strategies and threatens to undermine national efforts to modernise Ukraine’s higher education system.