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I discuss, on the basis of experience in Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, some common fears and negative opinions about the equality agenda in higher education. These include:
-“Standards will drop.”
-“Our reputation will suffer.”
-“It’s not our problem.”
-“It’s social engineering”
-“It’s unfair.”
-“It’s a waste of time.”

"La « mort annoncée de l’excellence » et autres craintes suscitées par les politiques d’enseignement supérieur axées sur l’équité"
M’inspirant d’exemples australiens, sud-africains ou encore britanniques, j’analyse dans ce rapport certaines craintes et préjugés couramment exprimés concernant les politiques d’enseignement supérieur axées sur l’équité. En voici un florilège :
- « C’est la mort annoncée de l’excellence. »
- « Cela va nuire à notre réputation. »
- « Ce n’est pas notre problème. »
- « C’est un abus de confiance pur et simple. »
- « Équité rime avec injustice. »
- « C’est une perte de temps. »

Zambia has a huge agricultural potential, which is still largely untapped, and could play a key role in growth and poverty eradication. Since the early 2000s, the government has implemented important reforms to promote privatisation and trade reforms, leading to higher investment and a strong growth in export crops such as cotton and horticulture. Despite this success, agricultural productivity, especially for food crops, remains low. The study shows that public resources to the agricultural sector have drastically decreased since the early 1990s, while private sector providers have not stepped in to fill the void left by the government disengagement from input supply and marketing. Despite a strong government commitment to reverse this trend, budget figures show that the share in total allocations dropped again in the 2008 budget. The study also argues that evaluations of past donor interventions in agriculture are not very positive, especially in terms of their sustainability. Projects often paid little attention to local absorptive and implementing capacity, had too narrow a focus on production and food security, and lacked an adequate understanding of the socio-economic conditions and behaviour of the target groups. Lack of co-ordination resulted in duplications and insufficient scale. A new generation of donor projects emerged in the early 2000s, with a strong focus on commercialisation and the development of market linkages, especially via contract farming. These projects have borne good results in terms of production volumes, quality standards and access to international commodity chains, as well as farmers’ income. The key challenge for donors is to scale up these success cases and ensure sustainability. The implementation of the Joint Assistance Strategy for Zambia 2007-2010 is an opportunity to achieve a better division of labour, strengthen synergies on the ground and reduce transaction costs for government. Acknowledgements The Zambia

This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem to give increasing importance to the more “social” aspects of jobs: useful and helpful jobs. The central finding of the paper is that, following a substantial fall between 1989 and 1997, subjective measures of job quality have mostly bounced back between 1997 and 2005. Overall job satisfaction is higher in 2005 than it was in 1989. Last, the rate of self-employment has been falling gently in ISSP data; even so three to four times as many people say they would prefer to be self-employed than are actually self-employed. As the self-employed are more satisfied than are employees, one consistent interpretation of the above is that the barriers to self-employment have grown in recent years.
The increasing importance of licensing for innovation is supported by ample anecdotal evidence. However, statistics on this topic are scarce. The OECD, together with the European Patent Office and the University of Tokyo, carried out a business survey on the licensing-out of patents. The goal was to investigate the intensity of licensing to affiliated and non-affiliated companies, its evolution, the characteristics, motivations and obstacles met by companies doing or willing to license. The target population was patent holders: 600 European firms and 1 600 Japanese firms responded to the survey, in the second half of 2007. The results show that patent licensing is widespread among patenting firms: around one company in five in Europe licenses patents to non-affiliated partners, whereas more than one in four does so in Japan. The relationship between size of the firm and probability to license out is U-shaped: small firms and large firms are more likely to license out their patented inventions. In Europe, SMEs have more difficulties to license out their patents than large firms. The major barrier to licensing out patent markets is informational (identifying partners). Finally, we also find that more than one third of young European firms (born after 2000) deem patents as quite or very important to convince private investors and venture capitalists to provide them with funds.
Definitions of high speed rail (HSR) differ, but a common one is rail systems which are designed for a maximum speed in excess of 250 kph (UIC, 2008). These speeds invariably involve the construction of new track, although trains used on them can also use existing tracks at reduced speeds. A number of countries have upgraded existing track for higher speed, with tilting technology on routes with a lot of curves. However such trains do not normally run at speeds above 200 km p h. Their rationale is to upgrade services at relatively low cost in countries which have sufficient capacity to cope with increased divergence of speeds on routes shared with all forms of traffic. Most of the countries which adopted this strategy initially, such as Britain and Sweden, are now considering building HSR. The only form of totally new technology that has come close to being implemented is maglev.
The concept of the general purpose (GP) lane has dominated modern highway thinking and practice in OECD countries, especially for limited-access highways such as inter-city motorways and urban expressways, whether tolled or non-tolled. This paper raises the question of whether, in some circumstances, specialized lanes for light vehicles (cars, vans and pickup trucks) and heavy vehicles (generally more than two axles) might be cost-effective.

Measures of student learning are playing an increasingly significant role in determining the quality and productivity of higher education. This paper evaluates approaches for estimating the value added by university education, and proposes a methodology for use by institutions and systems.

The paper argues that value-added measures of learning are important for quality assurance in contemporary higher education. It reviews recent large-scale developments in Australia, methodological considerations pertaining to the measurement and evaluation of student learning, and instruments validated to measure students’ capability, generic skills, specific competencies, work readiness and student engagement.

Four approaches to calculating value-added measures are reviewed. The first approach computes value-added estimates by comparing predicted against actual performance using data from entrance tests and routine course assessments. In the second approach, comparisons are made between outcomes from objective assessments administered to cohorts in the first and later years of study. Comparisons of first-year and later-year students’ engagement in key learning activities offer a third and complementary means of assessing the value added by university study. Feedback on graduate skills provided by employers is a fourth approach which gives an independent perspective on the quality of education.

Reviewing these four approaches provides a basis for their synthesis into a robust and potentially scalable methodology for measuring the value added by higher education. This methodology is advanced, along with its implications for instrumentation, sampling, analysis and reporting. Case studies are presented to illustrate the methodology’s potential for informing comparative analyses of the performance of higher education systems. 

 

Quelle différence ? Un modèle pour mesurer la valeur ajoutée de l’enseignement supérieur en Australie

L’évaluation des connaissances acquises par les étudiants est désormais un outil indispensable pour déterminer la qualité et la productivité de l’enseignement supérieur. Ce rapport examine les différentes approches permettant d’évaluer la valeur ajoutée de l’enseignement supérieur et propose une méthode utilisable à la fois au sein des établissements et à l’échelle des systèmes d’enseignement supérieur.

L’idée centrale qui sous-tend ce rapport est la suivante : la mesure des acquis des étudiants est l’un des piliers de l’assurance qualité au sein des systèmes d’enseignement supérieur modernes. L’auteur passe ainsi en revue les tendances majeures observées récemment en la matière en Australie, analyse les problèmes méthodologiques inhérents à la mesure et à l’évaluation des acquis des étudiants, et enfin étudie les instruments couramment employés pour mesurer les capacités, les compétences génériques et spécifiques, l’aptitude au travail et l’implication des étudiants.

Quatre méthodes de calcul de la valeur ajoutée sont ainsi passées en revue. La première consiste à estimer cette valeur ajoutée en comparant les performances escomptées et les performances réelles des élèves, à l’aide des résultats des tests d’admission et de ceux des évaluations réalisées en cours de cycle. La deuxième approche compare les résultats d’évaluations objectives d’étudiants pour chaque année d’étude (première année et suivantes). La troisième méthode utilisée pour évaluer la valeur ajoutée de l’enseignement secondaire, de nature complémentaire, consiste à comparer l’implication des étudiants dans certains modules d’apprentissage clés durant la première année et au cours des années suivantes. Enfin, la quatrième méthode étudiée envisage la qualité de l’enseignement supérieur selon une perspective différente, puisqu’elle tient compte des retours d’expérience de certains employeurs sur les compétences des jeunes diplômés.

L’examen de ces quatre approches permet ensuite de les synthétiser et d’obtenir une méthode fiable pour évaluer la valeur ajoutée de l’enseignement supérieur, ladite méthode consolidée offrant en outre le potentiel de s’adapter à différentes échelles. Il s’agit d’une approche sophistiquée, aux implications complexes en termes d’instrumentation, d’échantillonnage, d’analyse et de présentation des résultats. Une série d’études de cas permet à l’auteur de démontrer le potentiel offert par cette méthode pour étayer l’analyse comparative des performances de différents systèmes d’enseignement supérieur.

This article examines recent micro-evidence on the productivity of Indian firms, helping to explain why India’s manufacturing sector has not performed as well as many observers expected. A series of structural distortions are documented, all of which may depress the performance of manufacturing, and thus the economy as a whole.

These distortions exist at multiple levels, and reflect long-standing problems with the reallocation of labour across sectors, the excessively small scale of firms, low firm turnover, poor product market integration, high industry concentration and persistent state ownership. Combined, these phenomena represent severe restraints on the level and growth of productivity in manufacturing, and suggest that much remains to be done to improve the strength and sustainability of India’s development path.

Education plays an essential role in preparing the children of immigrants for participation in the labour market and society. Giving these children opportunities to fully develop their potential is vital for future economic growth and social cohesion in OECD countries. But migrant students in most OECD countries tend to have lower education outcomes than their native peers. Extensive previous research has described the system level, school level and individual level factors that influence the education outcomes of migrant students. Building on such previous research, this paper looks at the ways in which education policies can influence these factors to help provide better educational opportunities for migrant students.
This paper analyses recent large movements in the yield spread for sovereign bonds as between Germany and other euro area countries. While the general increase in risk aversion that has characterised the financial crisis is an important factor on its own, it is found that this has also magnified the importance of fiscal performance, in particular as measured by the ratio of debt service to tax receipts and expected fiscal deficits. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that such effects are non-linear, so that incremental deteriorations in fiscal performance lead to ever larger increases in the spread. These findings imply that financial market reaction could become an increasingly important constraint on fiscal policy for some countries, a feature which was much less apparent in the years prior to the financial crisis when general risk aversion was abnormally low.
Firms find advantages in sourcing inputs from abroad and in fragmenting their production process. On average, vertical trade represents about one third of total trade among OECD countries. This report describes and illustrates new firm strategies of vertical specialisation and explores the policy implications of new patterns of trade and FDI. It is in services industries that vertical trade has increased the most in recent years. While vertical trade seems to respond to the same determinants as the rest of exports and imports, distance-related trade costs play a more important role in explaining the volume of bilateral trade flows resulting from vertical specialisation. Distance-related costs have a lower impact on foreign direct investment and sales of foreign affiliates but there is a complementary relationship between trade and FDI. Vertical specialisation networks have created new challenges for trade policymakers. In particular, growth of bilateral exchanges between countries depends increasingly on barriers to trade and investment in the rest of the world. Moreover, the impact of a country’s own trade barriers on domestic firms is significant in the context of vertical specialisation. The analysis stresses the importance of multilateral negotiations for trade and investment liberalisation.
China has become the world’s largest urban nation, with over 600 million urban citizens today. Projections indicate that this level may reach 900 million in 2030. The way this urbanisation process is managed will have important policy implications for China and beyond. This paper provides an introduction to urban trends and policies in China. It describes urban growth trends, where and in what kinds of cities growth is occurring, how China’s cities are governed, and how public policy has influenced the extent, pace, and spatial distribution of urbanisation. As China continues to integrate with the globalising economy, its competitiveness will increasingly be driven by the capacities of its metropolitan regions to improve the productivity of enterprises in ever-widening supply chains. The report concludes with a description of some of the key policy challenges facing central and local urban governments in this global context, including: 1) institutional constraints to markets and factor mobility; 2) environmental challenges; 3) ensuring equity and helping vulnerable groups; and 4) metropolitan governance.
The collapse in world trade volumes at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 was exceptional by historical standards. This paper shows that world demand (to which trade has become more responsive in recent decades) can explain most of the collapse in world trade, but that tight credit conditions have likely amplified the short-term trade response. Credit tightening likely accelerated the trade decline through trade finance constraints and its relatively larger impact on trade-intensive sectors. A portion of the trade decline remains unexplained, which may reflect a possible breakdown in global supply chains. Looking ahead, the pace of normalisation in financial conditions and the future evolution of global supply integration will affect the speed of recovery in trade and global output.

We pursue a two-fold objective in this paper. First, we try to describe comprehensively the behaviour of sectoral growth cycles in Turkish manufacturing by using several statistical measures and to analyse the co-movement between them via correlation and peak-through analysis. One of the remarkable results of this study is the emergence of the "chemicals" and "paper and paper products"sectors as the leading sectors of total manufacturing. Another important result reveals that export-oriented sectors, which have a high correlation with total manufacturing and with each other, appear as the main drivers of total manufacturing. The second objective of this study is to investigate the response of output in Turkish manufacturing industries to monetary policy shocks within the vector autoregressive framework. The results show that all manufacturing sectors respond to a contractionary monetary policy shock with a reduction in absolute output but that the degree of output reduction is not the same in all sectors. The total manufacturing output declines very quickly after the shock, reaching its minimum value within three quarters.

Macroeconomic data are indispensable for modern governance, yet it is often unclear how reliable these data are. The production process of macroeconomic data inside the statistical offices is often not very transparent for the general public. Bystanders usually have no choice but to take for granted the published data because criteria by which to judge data quality are wanting. Hoping to contribute to a better understanding of the quality of macroeconomic data, this paper proposes several plausibility checks and applies them to recently published Swiss labour productivity growth figures. Although the proposed checks cannot "prove" or "disprove" the official data, they are capable of either strengthening our confidence in the official data or, alternatively, of casting them into doubt. Policy debates drawing on official data will hardly be able to ignore differences in the degree of confidence with which these data are held to be accurate.

This second ITF Transport Outlook continues building towards a full-fledged Transport Outlook, building upon the first Outlook (JTRC, 20081). The 2008 Outlook investigated the relation between expected GDP evolution and the demand for road transport, pointing out that transport demand and CO2-emissions could well turn out higher than commonly assumed given the projected evolution of GDP, and underlining the potential of improvements of fuel efficiency in controlling CO2-emissions from road transport. These topics were developed further in the “50 by 50 Global Fuel Economy Initiative”.2 The 2009 Outlook considers two themes that are closely linked to the International Transport Forums’s them for the 2009 meeting in Leipzig: Transport for a global economy – Challenges and opporturnities in the downturn. First, in Section 2, we focus on the evolution of GDP itself and how this evolution interacts with transport demand and investments in transport infrastructure. The analysis is a first brush at gauging the potential impacts of the economic and financial crisis. Specifically, we consider (a) the impact of the aggregate demand shock on the evolution of global GDP, (b) the need and potential for a rebalancing of global growth patterns, with their implications for trade and transport demand, and (c) the consequences of the widening funding gap for transport infrastructure investments. Second, in Sections 3 through 5, we discuss projections of the demand for road transport, aviation, and maritime transport. For road transport, more modest global growth leads to slower growth of the vehicle stock and of CO2-emissions, but the basic messages of the 2008 Outlook continue to hold. For aviation, we attempt to disentangle the effects of economic growth and of increased openness of markets on volume growth, and find that the latter is an important growth factor. For maritime transport, the focus is on likely development patterns and how they could be affected by the crisis, and how this does (not) affect recommendations for dealing with expected CO2-emissions.
Non-technological innovation is a major factor of competitiveness and productivity growth in the economy, notably in the service industries. However, the measurement of non-technological innovation and of innovation in the service industries is currently very poor, as traditional data sources like R&D or patents do not apply to these types of innovations. This document presents a strong candidate for quantifying non-technological innovation: trademark data. Trademarks constitute a rich and easily accessible source of data. Besides, several studies have shown that they are highly correlated with various innovation variables (patents, share of innovative sales). Lastly, trademarks have a large perimeter of application; they are present in almost every sector of the economy. Trademark data are then likely to convey information on two key (overlapping) aspects of innovation that are not well covered by traditional indicators: innovation in the service sectors and marketing innovation. This paper aims at presenting trademarks, their potential link with innovations and their main statistical properties, to see if they may actually serve as an innovation indicator.
This study analyses trade flows in intermediate goods and services among OECD countries and with their main trading partners. Combining trade data and input-output tables, bilateral trade in intermediate goods and services is estimated according to the industry of origin and the using industry for the period 1995-2005. Trade in intermediate inputs takes place mostly among developed countries and represents respectively 56% and 73% of overall trade flows in goods and services. Gravity regressions indicate that in comparison to trade in final goods and services, imports of intermediates are more sensitive to trade costs and are less attracted by bilateral market size. Further findings are that the activities of multinational enterprises can be associated with higher trade flows of intermediate inputs and with a higher ratio of foreign to domestic inputs in using industries. Results from production function regressions and from a stochastic frontier analysis suggest that a higher share of imported inputs leads to productivity gains in domestic industries and reduces inefficiencies in the use of technology.

This case study analyses the effect of trade and investment liberalisation on Korea’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector and finds that trade and investment have played a crucial role in innovation in this sector. In the initial stages of development, imported capital goods and components, joint ventures, licensing and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) contracts were important sources of technology and exports were key to obtain the necessary economies of scale for innovation. Free trade and investment policies in the 1990s and stronger protection of intellectual property rights have led to an increase in R&D and innovation, which in turn has led to the transformation of Korea into a knowledge-based economy. Keywords: innovation, Korea, information and communication technology, ICT, trade reform, Samsung, production network, intellectual property rights, IPR protection, patents, ITA, Information Technology Agreement

This study examines the role of trade and investment in technology transfer, the effects of competition in trade and investment on innovation, and economies of scale. It also examines global value chains as an organisational innovation in its own right, which is supported by a freer trade and investment environment. Keywords: innovation, multinational enterprises, MNEs, global value chains, technology transfer, competition, scale economies, licensing, intellectual property rights, TRIPs, absorption capacity, Doha Development Agenda.

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