The past ten years have witnessed a renewed interest in the apprenticeship system of industrial training. Employers have been shown to carry a large part of the cost of essentially general training with apparent little return to the firm - a problem which has generated a wide range of literature...

Mark Blaug has with good reason been described as the most widely read economist of his generation. He has made important contributions to economic history, cultural economics, the history of economic thought, the methodology of economics and the economics of education. Not Only an Economist...

Quality has never been more important for the future of higher education and the economy than it is today. Unfortunately, the decline in student quality is accompanied by costs that are out of control, a governance system that will not permit any reallocation of resources, and a society that...

Working within the context of the evolutionary-institutional transformation of higher education, the authors trace the development of an economic model by which the behavioral tendencies of modern universities can be evaluated. That model is expanded to provide insights to the following...

Incentives to Improve Education identifies three categories of incentives: rewards, (financial rewards for teachers), competition (educational choice, often in the form of payment for education by voucher) and threats (introduction of external standards and accountability for performance)

In most industrialized countries the tax burden of poor people has increased dramatically over the last few decades. This book analyses both the political origins of this increase and its consequences for the labour market

This book analyzes political decentralization and fiscal federalism in Canada and Germany, both traditional federal countries, and in Spain, a unitarian country engaged in the last two decades in a process of decentralization. Three key issues required for a well designed financing system are...

The definition and measurement of productivity in services raises important conceptual, methodological and strategic problems. This book aims to provide a critical review of the main debates on productivity in the domain of services. The first part examines the theoretical consequences of...

The sectoral composition of economies is fundamental to the understanding of growth, unemployment and the relative performance of nations. Henri de Groot models the relationship between these four factors from a single theoretical perspective in order to determine the foundations of the wealth...

Following German reunification in 1990, East Germany's centrally planned economy was abolished and replaced by West Germany's social market economy. Western Germany has since provided vast financial support to aid the transformation, and enable eastern Germany to catch-up with western Germany's...