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This report shares the findings and lessons learned from an investigation into the economics of disaggregated models for assessing and accrediting informal learners undertaking post secondary education. It presents some key economic and governance challenges for universities to consider in implementing OER assessment and accreditation policies. It also includes discussion of findings from a small-scale survey conducted by two of the authors on perceptions, practices and policies relating to openness in assessment and accreditation in post secondary institutions, with a particular focus on the "OER universitas" (OERu) concept. [This paper was presented at the OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference (Ljubljana, Slovenia, April 23-25, 2014).]

This position paper sets out to examine value creation in the engineering enterprise, a process that has mostly been associated with innovation and entrepreneurs. An analysis of the literature on engineering value creation in business studies, engineering and engineering education publications shows that there has been surprisingly little empirical study and thus the means by which most engineers contribute value is unclear in the literature. Analysis of published data and data from studies by the authors in engineering workplaces in Australia, South East Asia and Portugal suggests that the work performed by most engineers has little to do with innovation. Based on these data the authors identify 14 ways in which engineers create value. An important finding is that routine engineering performances by a majority of engineers, not associated with innovation or entrepreneurial activities, not only can be shown to create value, but also to protect accumulated value from inadvertent destruction. The paper outlines the educational implications of these findings and proposes measures that engineering educators can adopt to improve the understanding of engineering graduates about engineering value creation.

How much is hegemony and how much is self-determination in the higher education systems in Southeast Asia? This paper argues that while the question of centre and periphery is still relevant to the analysis of international university systems, the analytical frameworks from which it has arisen may lose viability in the long term. Southeast Asian states are making use of higher education to act in ways that will contribute to the altering of their peripheral position in the global economic and political system. While changes in Southeast Asian higher education are closely tied to global markets and follow what sometimes appears to be a dependent pattern of adaptations driven by Western developed economies, the paper argues that there is also a significant amount of resistance. As Southeast Asian countries adapt in ways that help embed economic globalisation within their national landscape, the manner in which the adaptation occurs is more selective, open, and democratic than before. Moreover, while global communication with core (centre) university systems has been more open and transparent, the system is closed to direct intervention from the outside, making hegemony a less plausible explanation for the manner in which the system is reacting within the new global environment of financial interdependency.

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 (Commonwealth of Independent States) and Eastern Europe. Trade openness is measured by using eight different indicators. The main empirical findings of the panel regression analysis reveal that in the long run, trade openness contributes positively to the inflow of FDI in developing economies.

This study examines generalized trust and trust in institutions in Confucian Asia, covering six countries namely, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, and one dependent region, Hong Kong. Using data from the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey, our study affirms the reliability and validity of using a two-item scale to measure generalized trust. Our analysis suggests that due to demographic differences, there are variations in the level of generalized trust of countries in Confucian Asia, despite the fact that these societies share a similar background in Confucian philosophy. The relationships between generalized trust and political trust, and between generalized trust and trust in public institutions, are weak but positive. The positive relationship between generalized trust and trust in economic institutions is only significant for some of the economies, while trust in international institutions has the weakest relationship with generalized trust for all societies. We conclude the paper with research implications.

Considering accountability, affordability, and access through the experiences in Chile, East Asia, Australia, Croatia, and the United States offers a clear reminder that trends and issues in higher education are often more similar across national contexts than they are distinct. Across higher education, institutions and systems are responding to massification, with concerns related to an often dramatic increase in participation prompting efforts toward quality assurance. That these accountability initiatives require enhanced capacity in institutional research is an essential lesson from the accounts of the five national experiences. In this article, the author provides a few reflections on accountability, affordability, and access worldwide.

The United States is entering a "post-European" reality, where the centers of world economics and politics have shifted. The world is increasingly dominated by Asia, and Third World nations represent America's most influential long-term economic and cultural partners. American educators must adopt their world view to the emerging global reality.(MLW)

Recently, computational Grids have proven to be a good solution for processing large-scale, computation intensive problems. However, the heterogeneity, dynamics of resources and diversity of applications requirements have always been important factors affecting their performance. In response to these challenges, this work first builds a Grid job scheduling architecture that can dynamically monitor Grid computing center resources and make corresponding scheduling decisions. Second, a Grid job model is proposed to describe the application requirements. Third, this paper studies the characteristics of commercial interconnection networks used in Grids and forecast job transmission time. Fourth, this paper proposes an application-aware job scheduling mechanism (AJSM) that includes periodic scheduling flow and a heuristic application-aware deadline constraint job scheduling algorithm. The rigorous performance evaluation results clearly demonstrate that the proposed application-aware job scheduling mechanism can successful schedule more Grid jobs than the existing algorithms. For successful scheduled jobs, our proposed AJSM method is the best algorithm for job average processing time and makespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special section examine the use of remote sensing technology to promote environmental sustainability in Asia-Pacific regions. Worldwide urbanization and deforestation are the two main interconnected ways that human activities are continually changing and reshaping the earth's surface. How earth observation and remote sensing technologies can contribute to improve the knowledge of the productivity and sustainability of natural and human ecosystems is an important theme in the global change community. In China, for instance, rapid economic growth and urbanization over the past three decades have resulted in dramatic changes in land use and land cover and have led to severe environmental consequences, which have made China's sustainable development a grand challenge. In the meantime, during the past few decades, environmental changes in the Asian–Pacific region have posed significant challenges to the scientific community. Therefore, the global problem of how earth observation and remote sensing technologies may be applied to assessing, monitoring, modeling, and simulating ecosystems, environments, and resources at various spatial and temporal scales translates into peculiar and very urgent questions and applications in this colossal and dynamic geographical region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National contributions to science are influenced by a number of factors, including economic capacity, national scientific priorities, science policy, and institutional settings and cultures. Nations do not have equal opportunities to access the global scientific market, and therefore, often seek out international partners with complementary resources and expertise. This study aims at investigating national collaboration strategies, with a focus on research leadership—measured through corresponding authorship—and its relationship with scientific impact. Results show that countries with higher R&D investments are more scientifically independent, and confirm that international collaboration is positively related to citation impact. However, leadership in international collaboration is inversely related with a countries’ share of international collaboration and there is a very little relationship between citation impact and international leadership. For instance, most countries—and particularly those that have fewer resources—have higher scientific impact when they are not leading. This suggests that, despite increasing global participation in science, most international collaborations are asymmetrical, and that the research system remains structured around a few dominate nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate the impact of coal enterprises’ vertical integration on the performance of innovation corporate social responsibility (ICSR) and to elaborate its specific transmission path through financing structure and market power. This paper takes the data of A-share listed coal company from 2008 to 2017 as samples, uses input-output table method to measure the degree of vertical integration, and explores the relationship between the four factors through multiple linear regression and Bootstrap method. We found that: (1) the vertical integration of coal enterprises has positive incentives for the promotion of ICSR. (2) Financing structure and market power play a chain intermediary role in this process of incentive. (3) In areas with high marketization process, vertical integration has more significant incentive effect on ICSR. The paper extends the research on the relationship between vertical integration and innovation, which provides a reference for the improvement of China’s supply-side reform and corporate social responsibility (CSR) fulfillment policy. It is helpful to promote the sustainable development of the coal industry, stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises, and improve the fulfillment of CSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we aim to establish a mathematical model to design a maximizing social welfare intervention mechanism of healthcare service goods in China. The intervention mechanism is helpful to facilitate the adoption of the healthcare service goods. We consider a research problem that regulates the supply chain system for healthcare service goods by an intervention mechanism, and two intervention strategies composed of demand-growth strategy and subsidy strategy are used to the combination of intervention mechanism. Then this paper presents a new method based on fuzzy set and bilevel programming to design the intervention mechanism. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct a case study for Wudang personalized health package and verify our model by the specific result analysis, the result indicates that our joint intervention mechanism is helpful to achieve the target and increase social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting: Research capacity is weakest in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) where operational research is highly relevant and needed. Structured Operational Research and Training Initiative (SORT IT) courses have been developed to train participants to conduct and publish operational research and influence policy and practice. Twenty courses were completed in Asia, Africa, Europe and the South Pacific between 2009 and 2014. Objectives: In the 20 completed SORT IT courses, to assess where the research was conducted, who was trained, who became facilitators in subsequent courses and course outcomes. Design: A cohort study of completed SORT IT courses Results: There were 236 participants (41% female) including 64 nationalities who conducted research in 59 countries, mostly from Asia and Africa (mean course duration = 9.7 months). Most participants (68%) were from government health programs and non-governmental agencies. A total of 213(90%) participants completed all milestones successfully with 41(19%) becoming subsequent course facilitators, 88% of whom were from LMICs. Of 228 manuscripts submitted to scientific journals, 197(86%) were either published or in press; in 86%, the principal investigator (first author) was a LMIC national. Papers were published in 23 scientific journals (impact factor 0.5–4.4) and covered 21 disease categories (median publication time = 5.7 months). Published papers (186) had 94,794 cumulative article views/downloads. Article views/downloads for immediate open access articles were double those from closed access journals. Conclusion: The SORT IT model has been effective in training personnel to produce relevant operational research in LMICs. It merits continued commitment and support for further scale-up and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness, to calculate the Fitness of subnational entities and we apply it to the states of Brazil. In the last decade, several indices were introduced to measure the competitiveness of countries by looking at the complexity of their export basket. Tacchella et al (2012) developed a non-monetary metric called Fitness. In this paper, after an overview about Brazil as a whole and the comparison with the other BRIC countries, we introduce a new methodology based on the Fitness algorithm, called Exogenous Fitness. Combining the results with the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPp), we look at the dynamics of the Brazilian states in the Fitness-Income plane. Two regimes are distinguishable: one with high predictability and the other with low predictability, showing a deep analogy with the heterogeneous dynamics of the World countries. Furthermore, we compare the ranking of the Brazilian states according to the Exogenous Fitness with the ranking obtained through two other techniques, namely Endogenous Fitness and Economic Complexity Index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]