Browse by: "Q"

This paper evaluates the link between educational policies and i) student performance and ii) macroeconomic measures of productivity. The analysis has two stages. First, using the 2015 and 2018 PISA databases, it quantifies the relationship between student test scores and the characteristics of students taking the tests, their school environment and national educational systems. Second, assuming that these relationships reflect the effect of different characteristics/policies on student test performance, the second stage converts the latter into an estimated effect on macroeconomic measures of productivity using a new measure of human capital as an intermediary variable. This new measure of human capital, devised in previous OECD work, combines student test scores and mean years of schooling with estimated elasticities that suggest the former is more important. The analysis shows a positive association between spending on education and student test scores, but only for levels of student expenditure below the OECD median, suggesting scope for currently low-spending countries to raise student performance with potential gains to long-run productivity. Boosting participation in early childhood education as well as improving teacher quality is found to generate large aggregate productivity gains. There are significant, but smaller, macroeconomic gains for many countries from limiting grade repetition and ability grouping across all subjects as well as increasing the accountability of schools. Finally, the results provide evidence for income inequality having a major influence on productivity through a human capital channel.

In recent years, provision of relevant up-skilling and re-skilling opportunities for adults has become a necessity due to global megatrends affecting labour markets. As a result, countries are looking to strengthen these opportunities throughout the life course. The successful deployment of these initiatives requires a coherent set of policies, with quality assurance being critically important. This paper provides an overview of quality assurance mechanisms from the perspective of the 38 OECD member countries. It proposes a framework to characterise and compare the governance, processes and outcomes of these mechanisms. The paper's contribution is to facilitate understanding of quality assurance across OECD countries, presenting a visual cross-country mapping that classifies existing mechanisms.

This paper uses a new measure of human capital, which distinguishes both quality and quantity components, to estimate the long-term effect of the COVID-19-related school closures on aggregate productivity through the human capital channel. Productivity losses build up over time and are estimated to range between 0.4% and 2.1% after 45 years, for 12 weeks and 2 years of school closure, respectively. These results appear to be broadly consistent with earlier findings in the literature. Two opposing effects might influence these estimates. Online teaching would lower economic costs while learning losses in tertiary education (not considered here) would inflate them. Policies aimed at improving the quality of education and adult training will be needed to offset or, at least, alleviate the impact of the pandemic on human capital.

In this article we give a presentation of the Norwegian quality based financing (QBF) mechanism and our experiences with this financing mechanism. The article outlines the main features of the Norwegian health care system, and its financing mechanisms. We then focus in on the QBF with a description of the system and the main considerations on which the system is based. We give a short theoretical framework on how to design quality based financing systems, and show how the consequences can vary depending on the design of the system. The Norwegian system has been evaluated, and the main findings of this evaluation is discussed together with some tentative predictions about the future developments.

Socio-economic cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a powerful framework that can be very useful to governments making investment decisions. However the standard application of transport CBA has room for improvement. This paper describes efforts to improve the quality of transport CBA and its applicability to decision making. Three areas are addressed in detail: strategies for making the most of CBA, valuing and forecasting reliability benefits, and capturing wider economic impacts. The report is based on the papers and discussions at a Roundtable meeting of 30 experts held in Paris in November 2015. Roundtable participants took the view that a multi-faceted approach is needed to address the shortfalls; CBA theory and practice need to be gradually expanded to incorporate more impacts in the rigorous valuation and forecasting framework; and CBA results need to be more effectively linked to other criteria in the broader decision-making framework, including by bringing in a more diverse evidence base.

The last decades have witnessed an increased concern in higher education over accountability, quality and productivity, and a struggle to meet increasingly complex challenges. This is more so in Middle East and North African (MENA) economies that witnessed a large expansion as a result of a high social demand and massification policies adopted by governments in public institutions. These policies also allowed the private sector to expand to meet the increasing demand. As a consequence, higher education institutions were faced with serious challenges related to quality because the quantitative expansions took place at the expense of quality (UNESCO, 2010). Although 14 out of 20 MENA economies established national bodies for quality assurance and accreditation, quality issues are still challenging higher education institutions in the region. The author presents the achievements, challenges and issues in quality in higher education in the region. She also briefly presents several international organisations’ initiatives and perspectives on quality in higher education in the region, and attempts to propose a set of suggestions and recommendations to move the systems to higher standards that are compatible with international ones.
This paper covers the following 20 economies in the MENA region: Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan*, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen. Please note that wherever the term “the region” is used in the article, it refers to these economies.

Medical education is not exempt from the increasing societal expectations of accountability and this is evidenced by an increasing number of litigation cases by students who are dissatisfied with their assessment. The time and monetary costs of student appeals makes it imperative that medical schools adopt robust quality assured assessment processes. The success of these processes depends on the ability of faculty to determine the necessary changes required and manage the change process. Openness to change is critical; therefore, identifying the processes that facilitate staff openness constitutes an important step in better understanding how higher education institutions can ensure that staff members are willing to support and engage in change initiatives. This paper examines the contribution of the three attributes of the change model (content, process and context) in relation to staff openness to the quality assurance processes of assessment changes that were implemented at the University of Tasmania’s School of Medicine.

The procedures commonly employed for quality assurance in higher education are designed as if the endeavour were a technical process, whereas it may be more useful to view it as a political process. For example, quality assurance requires making choices among competing conceptions of quality, and in so doing privileges some interests over others. Moreover, some stakeholders tend to be given a greater voice than others in the design and implementation of quality assurance. The author concludes that rather than denying the political nature of quality assurance, it would be better to accept Morley’s claim that quality assurance is “a socially constructed domain of power”, and design procedures for it in a way that is appropriate for a political process. It is suggested that employing the “responsive model” of evaluation could make quality assurance more effective in improving educational quality. In the responsive model, evaluation is deemed to be a collaborative process that starts with the claims, concerns and issues put forth by all stakeholders.