Market-based reforms of state schooling systems have been justified by the benefits anticipated from encouraging greater inter-school competition in local schooling markets. Promoting increased school choice and competition by comparison were seen as a means of stimulating greater allocative,...

There is a wide range of theoretical and empirical analyses suggesting that technological change has increased the demand for skills. Since training is a mechanism to upgrade workers’ skills, it would be expected that technical progress strengthens the importance of training on account of the...

The market choice critique was an important part of the arguments which led to UK schooling reforms, yet economic analysis has been neglected in assessments of those reforms. We provide an economic critique of the operation of schooling quasi-markets and use this to re-interpret the findings of...

Discussions and debates among scholars on "techno-globalism" and "techno-nationalism" centre on the significance of knowledge augmenting or basic research in the R&D activities of multinational firms. Not every researcher, however, shares this dichotomy [see Archibugi & Michie, 1995] but, it...

One of the promised consequences of market-based reforms of state schooling systems was an increase in the diversity of curricula offered in schools. In this paper we utilise economic analysis to explore the influence of an increase in competitive pressures within a local schooling market on the...

Little is known about the social and private returns to graduation for mature students in the U K. However, the post-Dearing changes in the funding of higher education have initially been associated with a significant fall in applications from this group of entrants. This paper, by providing an...

Recent reforms in the UK have attempted to increase the degree of competition in schooling markets. In this paper we develop a simple model to analyse school behaviour in the type of local quasi-markets created by these reforms. The distinctive features of this model are that both the quantity...