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In the globalizing economy, knowledge generation can catalyze local, regional, and national economic development. Governments everywhere face pressures to adapt to this new environment, and universities are recognized as strategic resources. This paper assesses changes in the ideas and actions of stakeholders concerning the role of universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, focusing on universities operating in a dynamic sub-region in each country. Attention is given to how different levels of government promote or inhibit innovative actions by universities and the organizations they partner with to commercialize research. Efforts to create regional knowledge economies effectively linked to the global marketplace are shown to have generated a range of tensions and dilemmas. The findings presented here highlight themes likely to feature in future debates over policy design and governance arrangements for universities and other strategic public and quasi-public organizations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]