This paper focuses on children with a migration background and conceptualises their migration experience as adversity. The paper adapts the resilience framework to understand how immigrant children can overcome adversity. The paper discusses policy models that can be derived from adopting a resilience approach to the measurement of immigrant…

In the quest to improve measured educational outcomes national governments across the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and beyond have instituted large-scale assessment (LSA) policies in their public schools. Controversy almost universally follows the implementation of such testing, related to such topics as: a)…

In the early 1980's an education policy in Chile was formulated that encouraged the private sector to participate more strongly in the delivery of the educational service, with the purpose to achieve to have more students attending the education system and decentralize the education responsibility from the State. On the other hand, in the 1990's…

This paper examines the importance of trade openness for attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows, using a sample of 36 developing economies for the period 1990-2008. It provides a direct test of causality between FDI inflows, trade openness and other key variables in developing regions of the world: Latin America, Asia, Africa, CIS…

Using Simmel's notion of sociation, the way in which rural elders in England and Wales relate to, or connect with, each other and others within their community, can be seen to be conflictual as well as consensual. As a vehicle for exploiting this relationship, social capital also can be antithetic as well as convergent and an important element of…

There are substantial differences in happiness in nations. Average happiness on scale 0-10 ranges in 2006 from 3.24 in Togo to 8.00 in Denmark and the inequality of happiness, as measured by the standard deviation, ranges from 0.85 in Laos to 3.02 in the Dominican Republic. Much of these differences are due to quality of governance and in…

There is a growing literature on the assessment of quality of life conditions in geographically and/or politically divided regions. Sometimes these territories are countries within a specified supranational structure, such as the European Union, for instance, and sometimes they are regions within countries. There is also some research that focuses…

The OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) constitute two of the largest ongoing international student and teacher surveys presently underway. Data generated from these surveys offer researchers and policy-makers opportunities to identify particular educational…

In recent years, schools have tended to eliminate recess period and to devote more time to instruction in order to increase academic achievement. Using a nationally representative sample, this study examined reading scores of students who experienced different numbers of recess days in a week, and different number of times and length of recess in…

It is commonly assumed that better living standards will boost subjective well-being. The post-apartheid South African government subscribes to this idea; its social policies aim to provide "a better life for all". Since the coming of democracy in 1994, the state has built over 3 million houses and supplied electricity and clean water to…

This empirical research involves the investigation of teachers' perceptions of a school transfer scheme whereby children aged 11+ years transfer permanently from primary to secondary school four weeks before the end of the summer term, in mid-June, in a small English town. Expressed perceptions of the secondary school staff concerning the…

We employ Data Envelopment Analysis to compute the technical efficiency of Italian and English higher education institutions. Our results show that, in relation to the country-specific frontier, institutions in both countries are typically very efficient. However, institutions in England are more efficient than those in Italy when we compare…

Most countries have experienced soaring enrolment rates into tertiary education. While this is beneficial both to involved students and to knowledge-based societies, it also makes the funding issue even more crucial than it is usually seen to be. This paper presents first results from an analysis of the effectiveness of student loans as a funding…

Schools are increasingly expected to take responsibility for aspects of educational quality assurance. The fact that the Flemish government requires its schools to conduct self-evaluations of their equal opportunities policies is an example of this. This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the quality of these school…

This paper adopts the technique of [DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996). "Labour market institutions and the distribution of wages 1973-1992: A semiparametric approach." "Econometrica, 64"(5), 1001-1044.] to decompose differences in the distribution of PISA reading scores in Canada, and assesses the relative contribution of…