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In many respects, adjustment to the new commercial environment has been painful and damaging to the academic profession in Australia. The profession is now more fragmented and has lost political influence and standing. Academic salaries have failed to keep pace with professional salaries and many academics are highly critical of changes in government higher education policy, reduced government financial support for universities and structural and management changes within their institutions. Many feel a strong sense of frustration, disillusionment and anger. However, not all adjustments have been negative. Australian academics today are better-qualified, work harder and are more productive in research than they were in the 1970s. They continue to be deeply interested in key academic roles and many still find their jobs satisfying. Many have made successful transitions to involvement in research links with industry and other entrepreneurial activities, without jeopardising their academic integrity. But the views of PhD students give cause for concern, especially dissatisfaction about course experience, uncertainty about future careers and highly negative views of both universities and academic employment...

Over the last few years, university professors’ careers have undergone a change approaching a true revolution: a major diversification in career models, from fundamental research to professional innovation to knowledge transfer; increased use of computerised tools and the Internet in both teaching and research; the all but mandatory requirement to form research teams and networks, often multidisciplinary in nature; the growth in partnerships with industry for both training and research; and ever more complex and demanding regulations governing intellectual property. We also see more competition, often ferocious, among universities and between academe and private companies to attract the most promising candidates. In this context, it has become more vital than ever before for universities to put in place reinforcement systems that are both fair and capable of motivating excellence and of attracting and retaining the best people. In past decades, the traditional reinforcers were the merit pay system and tenure, not counting other incentives used on a random and situational basis, generally in the absence of well-established rules. The current context demands a richer, more complex, more transparent and more diversified reinforcement system that will integrate a set of incentives that are more closely tied to current academic needs and faculty members’ quality of life. This article, which is based on the experiences and thought process of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Université de Montréal and on the orientations of a number of North American universities, illustrates an integrated approach to academic reinforcement systems, from hiring to retirement, and a merit pay model adapted to the university of the 21st century. The need to review promotion criteria and standards is particularly emphasised...

Many African countries are benefiting from reductions in their external debt. One important objective is to redirect the budgetary resources released from servicing external debt towards poverty-reducing expenditures. Several questions arise in this context. First, are the public expenditure management (PEM) systems of African countries robust enough to allow specific povertyreducingexpenditures to be identified in annual budgets and tracked in countries’ accounting systems? Second, does the expenditure control system allow poverty-reducing expenditures to be protected from cuts should there be unforeseen shortfalls in revenues? Third, are internal and external audit mechanisms effective, so as to ensure the integrity of expenditure reports, both in-year and annually? To answer these and other questions, an assessment of the entire PEM system is required in each country. Such a study has already been prepared.1 During 2001, the PEM systems of 24 low-income countries were assessed based on a common set of 15 questions in the areas of budget preparation, budget execution, and fiscal reporting. Figure 1 shows the results for two regions of Africa (Anglophone countries and Francophone countries) – well below what is required to meet the objectives of effective PEM systems (both regions attained only about 40% of the required benchmarks)...

This paper reports on recent work on improving the effectiveness of aid allocations, and extends the scope of analysis beyond the aid-policy-growth-poverty linkages to include three new elements: a broader range of poverty-relevant objectives and effectiveness constraints of aid; practical experience in the application of quantitative analysis to allocations; and analytic approaches to determining shares of aid through multilateral channels and for global public goods. There is wide consensus on the main allocation criteria for effectiveness in reducing poverty through pro-poor growth: the level and incidence of poverty and the development performance of partner countries. Other variables that raise the impact of aid on growth are helping vulnerable countries adjust to shocks, debt relief and post-conflict reconstruction. Considering broader development and humanitarian objectives, aid should also be allocated to prevent violent conflict and to improve governance and social conditions in “difficult partnerships”. In addition, global public goods are severely under-funded, and there is some evidence of under-funding of multilateral programmes...

A reoccurring motif in pension literature and policy is the search for “benefit security” – that is, assurance to members of a pension regime that, at the end of the working career, they will get some reasonably predictable outcome, either as a pension (benefit stream) or a lump sum. The purpose of this note is to present a simple “thought experiment” to explore this matter and how market mechanisms might be brought more to bear...

Over the next decades, OECD countries will experience a significant ageing of their populations. Changes in the age structure of populations affect the economy’s saving behaviour, including the level of saving and the choices of saving vehicles. During the 1990s, financial markets in general and equity markets in particular may have benefited from large inflows into pension funds and other institutionalised forms of saving. These inflows reflected to a considerable extent saving for retirement by baby boom generations. These baby boom generations are expected to start to move into retirement after 2010. Almost as a natural corollary to the developments during the 1990s, some observers have argued that when baby boomers start entering retirement they will become net sellers of financial assets to finance retirement consumption...