The modern history of Nepal started after the Kingdom of Nepal was formed during the 1760s through a series of military battles, which is now known as a national unification campaign, led by Prithvi Narayan Shah. The history of mass education, however, started during the 1950s when a political uprising overthrew autocratic Rana regime that had…

This article examines how Chinese education officials interpret and utilise selective information from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to legitimate and consolidate contested reform messages and initiatives in Shanghai. A content analysis of data obtained from newspaper articles, official documents and education essays…

This article examines global changes in tracking policies over the post-World War II period. Using a newly constructed quantitative panel data set of 139 countries from 1960 to 2010, I show that a majority of countries around the world have shifted away from sharply tracked institutions at the junior secondary level toward more formally…

Taking a lead from recent articles in "The History Teacher," the author placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths, Monsters, and Markets." Drawing on folklore, literature, popular culture, and economics, the course explored the rise of…

In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital…

Globalization has unleashed profound changes in education. These include positivistic international school comparisons, a singular focus on schools as drivers of economic development, and the adoption of neoliberal market principles in school. These changes, however, generally go unexamined within the field and literature of global education.…

Between 1960 and 2010, Singapore's real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita skyrocketed from $4,383 to $55,862, while Jamaica's barely increased from $6,417 to $8,539. It is plausible that differing rates of GDP growth are associated with differences in the development of education systems but causally the linkage is not well understood. Using…

The mobile phone has arguably become the most ubiquitous information communication technology (ICT) in the world, including in the developing world. Introduced in the Philippines in the early 1990s, mobile phone penetration is expected to reach 100 percent in 2013, an interesting phenomenon since a third of the country lives below the poverty…

Infrastructure is a worldwide policy priority for national development via regional integration into the global economy. However, economic, ecological and social research draws contrasting conclusions about the consequences of infrastructure. We present a synthetic approach to the study of infrastructure, focusing on a multidimensional treatment…

Policy documents for schools and education are being increasingly standardised all over the world and some research claims that a global curriculum is developing in which aspects such as entrepreneurship, lifelong learning and sustainable development are common denominators. This is regarded as a sign that economic rationality is gaining more and…

Research universities and institutes assume a vital role in domestic economic development. Research universities are assigned the responsibility to train doctoral and post-doctoral students and to form new generations of faculty. Despite their critical role, the effectiveness of institutions regarding research production is rarely studied,…

Examines the relationship between the international telephone network and democratization through network analysis. Highlights include principles of modern democracy; community and global interactions; a country's pattern of communication and its relationship to democratic development; and a country's position in the international telephone…

Based on detected correlations between the strategic collaboration of U.S.-based diasporas and their respective ancestral homelands on the one hand and the socioeconomic and technological development of those homelands on the other, this paper, which provides a conceptual foundation of the correlation, attempts to ignite a new area of research on…

Bridging the areas of political-economic sociology, the sociology of agriculture and environmental sociology, this study tests two hypotheses derived from a refined theory of foreign investment dependence. The hypotheses state that pesticide and fertilizer use intensity in less-developed countries are both positively associated with foreign…

The World Bank is a body that declares its vision to be a world free of poverty. It has long recognised that poverty and illiteracy are closely correlated and that illiteracy is a hindrance to economic and social development. The 180 or so governments that own the Bank have declared literacy to be a human right, so the Bank itself presumably also…