In 2015, the United Nations (UN) declared 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to be achieved by 2030, but the COVID-19 pandemic has stalled the world's progress in pursuing them. This article explores how the pandemic has impacted the public health and education sectors of the world's poorest 46 countries, identified by the UN…

This paper examines the increasingly diverse range of roles played by the corporate sector in shaping education policy. While a growing body of scholarship has documented the deepening embeddedness of the corporate sector within policy-making processes, empirical research on the strategies mobilized by corporate actors remains unsystematised and…

Education within capitalism too often reproduces social and economic inequalities. Schools are depicted as failing and teachers are blamed. In this paper, I examine the discourses underlying this situation and the role of foundations in the US and the World Bank in developing countries in maintaining it. I look at the neoliberal remedy of…

In recent years, privatization has been a growing phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is viewed as an instrument used by the public sector to reduce the role of the state in the economies while enhancing the scope of private ownership and participation of goods and services (Akram et al, 2011). Researchers have noted that the telecommunication…

In most developing countries, as the young population increase in number and consequently, the demands for higher education rise, the governments cannot respond to all demands. Accordingly, they develop private higher education sectors as an alternative solution. In developed countries, some moving factors are influential in creation and the…

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization has generated an intense and passionate debate about the relationship between free-trade and education and, specifically, about the effects of trade liberalization in national education systems. This article explores in detail this debate from a critical discourse…

The thrust for globalisation of society has taken centre stage. This means that people around the world are required to develop high level but low cost technologies and innovative competencies in order to enhance social development. In the field of higher education, university managers need to join the technological revolution by adopting low cost…

A global revolution has been taking place in higher education during the past half-century. In the educators' view, four fundamental and interrelated forces have impelled the current academic revolution: the "massification" of higher education, globalization, the advent of the knowledge society and the importance of research universities…

Using Latin America as a broad context and drawing on evidence from some of its most heavily indebted states as cases, this paper considers the example of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and education as a means of exploring the question of whether poverty reduction strategies of the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank and the…

With some exceptions, a liberal version of neoclassical economics dominated public policy in the United States from the New Deal through the 1970s; and in many other countries as well. However, beginning in 1980, there was a visible sea change that brought conservatives and public choice economists to power. Ronald Reagan was elected President of…

This article is a compilation of the views of 16 PhD students and the author on Steven Klees' 2007 article titled, "A quarter century of neoliberal thinking in education: Misleading analyses and failed policies." The students and the author have taken Klees' article as a stimulus to try and explicate the anatomy of the decline of the…

Public-private partnerships in education exist in various forms around the world, in both developed and developing countries. Despite this, and despite the importance of human capital for economic growth, systematic analysis has been limited and scattered, with most scholarly attention going to initiatives in the United States. This volume helps…

The increased marketisation and privatisation of schooling in economically developing countries struggling to achieve Education for All and Millennium Development Goals warrants a focused examination of the phenomenon. However, there is little work on the nature and extent of private provision in countries that, on the one hand, are striving to…