Higher Education and Economic Development

Higher education policy is becoming increasingly important on national agendas. The widespread recognition that tertiary education is a major driver of economic competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-driven global economy has made high-quality tertiary education more important than ever in both industrialised and developing countries. As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2008) has recently pointed out, tertiary education contributes to social and economic development through four major missions:

• The formation of human capital (primarily through teaching).
• The building of knowledge bases (primarily through research and knowledge development).
• The dissemination and use of knowledge (primarily through interactions with knowledge users).
• The maintenance of knowledge (primarily through inter-generational storage and transmission of knowledge).