The approaches to governance employed by various societies have become increasingly similar, following a pattern of reforms that move away from the control mode to the supervisory mode. To this end, direct central involvement is being replaced by a model that relies on more sophisticated forms of funding, monitoring, and performance review. This…

The paper reviews Asia-Pacific higher education and university research, focusing principally on the "Confucian" education nations Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam. Except for Vietnam, these systems exhibit a special developmental dynamism--still playing out everywhere except Japan--and have created a…

This paper views seeking the optimal balance between state strengths and the scope of state functions for "good governance" as the formation of a homogenization-heterogenization matrix of policy initiatives in different social settings. Homogenization refers to a global tendency for institutional changes and governance framework to…

Discusses globalization effects on national policy in Taiwan, focusing on how the higher education sector has transformed itself under the global tide of marketization and decentralization. Although globalization trends are clear, the nation-state is still a powerful actor in shaping national development and resolving global-national tensions.…

This paper examines the expansion of higher education in Taiwan from 1950 to 1994, looking first at the patterns of the expansion and, secondly, attempting to account for these patterns. Higher education in Taiwan is defined as general universities and colleges, institutes of technology, and junior colleges with governance of the system under the…