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This paper estimates the financial returns to higher education quality in the UK. To account for the selectivity of students to institution, we rely on a selection on observable assumption. We use several estimates including the Generalised Propensity Score (GPS) of Hirano and Imbens, which relies on a continuous measure of institutional quality. This highlights that the returns to quality are heterogeneous and mostly driven by high-quality institutions. Moving from an institution in the third quality quartile to a top quality institution is associated with a 7% increase in earnings.

As part of the evaluation of an experimental programme of surveillance of institutions for the semi‐independent and frail elderly using the RAF method, an examination was made of the licensing status, quality of care, and completeness of the surveillance process. Included in the examination were 126 institutions which underwent the surveillance process between 1990 and 1993. Aims to investigate whether the RAF method of surveillance was being implemented in a professional and uniform manner. Concludes that surveyors’ recommendations to grant or not grant a licence were usually based on findings about the quality of care. Nevertheless, in order to reinforce the relationship between licensing and quality of care, it was suggested that surveyors be given clear criteria of quality on which to base their recommendations regarding conditional licensing. It was found that the surveillance process is indeed implemented uniformly in long‐term care institutions of varying quality.

This study employs survey methods to statistically examine the internationalization of quality assurance (IQA) in Taiwanese higher education. The data collected were analyzed to assess the associations between administrators' opinions of the importance of IQA and their evaluations of its implementation, as well as the relationship between implementation and opinions on seven measures of international quality. The study also explores the mediating effect of implementation assessments on the relationship between opinions of the importance of IQA and opinions of international quality.

This study targeted higher education administrators from universities in Taiwan, including presidents, vice presidents, deans, section chiefs, directors, and heads of schools in various departments. Using systematic sampling methods, 80 universities were selected from a population of 159 higher education institutions in Taiwan, with 17-40 potential participants each in 2015. A total of 2,377 questionnaires were distributed to all the administrators of those institutions, and ultimately, 65 institutions and 337 valid questionnaires were analyzed.

The importance of IQA directly and positively influenced implementation of it on higher education institutions. The implementation directly and positively influenced the level of international quality of the institutions and the importance of IQA had an indirect positive influence on international quality through implementation. The aggregated institution-level results were similar to but much stronger than the individual-level results.

This study examined the IQA of higher education in Taiwan, which is increasingly important to institutions' competitiveness in the global higher education market. The data were analyzed using multilevel structural equation modeling at the individual-level and the aggregate-level. The analysis revealed direct and indirect associations between opinions about IQA and institutional quality. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature because it clarifies the role of administrators (individually and collectively) regarding their institutions' educational quality, and it provides useful information that institutions could apply to improve their international competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the resource rents–quality-adjusted human capital nexus and the impact of quality of institutions.

For a large data set of 161 countries for the period 1996–2018 (yearly and 4-year periods), fixed effect estimation method is applied to investigate the impact of resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital and the role of quality of institutions on this relationship.

The paper found little evidence on the negative, significant and direct impact of total resource rents on quality-adjusted human capital. However, the results show that the negative effect of resource rents can be mediated by the quality of institutions. This result is robust to a long list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. Therefore, institutional quality seems to play a critical role in determining the indirect impact of natural resources on human capital. Moreover, the obtained results demonstrate that this resource adverse effect depends on the type of resource rents; in particular, high dependency on oil rents in developing countries appears to harm human capital.

The paper shows that it is not obvious that total resource rents decrease human capital and found that the coefficient is no longer significant in the two-way fixed effects model. However, the analysis has emphasized the crucial role of political institutions in this relationship and has shown that countries with higher quality of institutions make the most of their resource rents transiting to a better human capital environment. This result is found to be robust to a list of controls, different specifications and estimation techniques, as well as several robustness checks. In addition, we demonstrate that not all resources affect human capital in the same way and found that oil rents have a significant negative effect on human capital. This is an important distinction since several countries are blessing from oil rents. From this we conclude that the effect of natural resources on human capital varies across different types of commodities. On the other hand, the interaction between institutions and the sub-categories of resource rents shows that oil rents can increase human capital only in developing countries with higher quality of institutions (above the threshold). This result is also still hold while using alternative measures of political institutions.

The results in this paper have important policy implications. In particular, results highlight important heterogeneities in the role resource rents to the economy. As international commodity prices have shown high volatility in recent years, it is important for policy makers to understand the rents. Rents which are the difference between the price of a commodity and the average cost of producing it can have different effects in the economy, including the human capital. It is shown that in countries with low-quality institutions, natural resource rents negatively affect institutional quality, leading to conflicts, corruption and fostering rent-seeking activities. Overall, this reinforces the elite at the power that, obviously, is interested in preserving the status quo. In other words, there is a vicious circle between resource rents and low-quality institutions that impedes institutional change. How to regulate this in the best possible way requires a good understanding of how resource rents are generated and appropriated for different sectors, their different effects and how people react to these rents. The evidence suggests the policy toward better political institutions may help countries to improve social outcomes such as health and education which offer high social returns.

The paper is part of the author's PhD research and is an original contribution.

Innovation has been considered as an essential activity for companies to compete in modern and dynamic business environments. For the nations, innovation is considered a fundamental key activity for sustaining economic growth and competitive advantage over other countries. This paper aims to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between the quality of a country’s institutions and its levels of innovation activities and results.

Controlling for the effects of the efforts and investments in research and development (R&D) and the foreign direct investments (FDI), this work proceeds to regression analysis to obtain the association between the quality of countries’ institutions and their innovation activities. Data was obtained from the Global Innovation Index (GII) for innovation activities and the Worldwide Governance Index, of the World Bank, for the quality of institutions for 127 countries.

The results show that the effectiveness of public administration and the regulatory quality are the quality of institution variables associated with the innovation activities. Also, this paper obtained a clustering of countries with a rank regarding not only innovation activities but also the conditions of the institutions’ quality, based on government effectiveness, regulatory quality, R&D, FDI and GII. This new compounded classification divided the 127 countries into three clusters – mature innovators, fresh innovators and structuring for innovation.

New forms of innovations’ ranking viewing can help to understand the conditionings that enhance countries’ and institutions’ competitiveness.

The higher education system has been entrusted globally to provide quality education, especially to the youth, and equip them with required skills and capabilities. The visionaries and policymakers of the countries around the world have been working relentlessly to improve the standard of the higher education system by establishing national and global accreditation and ranking bodies and expecting measuring performance through setting up accreditation and ranking parameters. This paper focuses on the review of Indian university accreditation and ranking system and determining its efficacy in improving academic quality for achieving good position in global quality accreditation and ranking.

The study employed exploratory research approach to know about the accreditation and ranking issues of Indian higher education institutions to overcome the challenges for being globally competitive. The accreditation and ranking parameters and score of leading Indian universities was collected from secondary data sources. Similarly, the global ranking parameters and scores of these Indian universities with top global universities was explored. The performance gaps of Indian university in global academic quality parameter is assessed by comparing it with scores of global top universities. Further, each domestic and global accreditation and ranking parameters have been taken up for discussion.

The study identified teaching and learning, research and industry collaboration as common parameter in the accreditation and ranking by Indian and global accreditation and ranking body. Furthermore, the study revealed that Indian accreditation and ranking body assess leniently on parameters and award high scores as compared to rigorous global accreditation and ranking practice. The study revealed that “research” and “citations” are important parameters for securing prestigious position in global ranking, this is the reason Indian universities are trailing. The study exposed that Indian academic fraternity lack prominence in research, publication and citations as per need of global accreditation and ranking standards.

The limitation of this study is that it focused only on few Indian and global accreditation and ranking bodies. The future implication of this study will be the use of methodology designed in this study for comparing accreditation and ranking bodies’ parameters of different continents and countries in different economic development stages i.e. emerging and developed economies to know the disparity and shortcomings in their higher education system.

The article is a review and comparison of national and global accreditation and ranking parameters. The article explored the important criteria and key indicators of accreditation and ranking that would provide an important and meaningful insight to academic institutions of the emerging economies of the world to develop its competitiveness. The study contributed to the literature on identifying benchmark for improving academic and higher education institution quality. This study would be further helpful in fostering new ideas toward setting up of contemporary globally viable and acceptable academic quality standard.

This is possibly the first study conducted with novel methodology of comparing the Indian and global accreditation and ranking parameters to identify the academic quality performance gap and suggesting ways to attain academic benchmark through continuous improvement activity and process for global competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to provide information on development of standards in Tanzania which may be of help to training providers in other countries as they seek to improve the quality and standards of their provision.

The need to provide quality assured tertiary qualifications in Tanzania to win both national and international recognition is explained. Processes of registration of institutions capable of delivering training programmes adequately and accreditation of the same to offer awards at appropriate levels as a means to ensure quality of provision are explored. Standards of good practice in Tanzanian tertiary education are surveyed and the challenges to their achievement are discussed based on the author's direct experience in Tanzania. Relevant and recent literatures on the topic are surveyed and some lessons drawn.

Accreditation standards are useful in instilling best practices in education and training. However, education and training institutions need to understand and practice them over a period of time to bring about expected results. It is concluded that ensuring quality in education is a multifaceted phenomenon that calls for the joint efforts of all key stakeholders.

The paper illustrates that the National Council for Technical Education is one of the first regulatory bodies in Africa to introduce academic quality standards in tertiary technical institutions. Notable improvements have been recorded since its inception. The experience described is the paper is not very common, so other countries taking similar steps may find it useful.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of quality of market supporting institutions (institutional quality) in host country and the similarities and differences of institutional quality between the home and host country (institutional distance) on subsidiary performance.

Based on the conceptualization of new institutional economics, the authors divide quality of host country institutions into factor markets; product, capital, labor market and sociopolitical dimensions. The authors examine the impact of the quality these institutional dimensions in host countries and their difference between home and host country on the performance of 318 subsidiaries of 146 Korean listed manufacturing firms operating in 28 host countries from 2001 to 2006.

The empirical results based on 1,129 observations show that institutional distance explains a significant variance in the subsidiary performance. In particular, the difference in quality of institutions in product, capital and labor market has negative impact on subsidiary performance. However, except for quality of regulation in labor market, host country institutional qualities do not significantly explain the variation in subsidiary performance.

The evidence suggests that host country institutions matter substantially when considered with their relative similarity and difference with home country institutions. The impact of individual dimensions of institutions varies on subsidiary performance.

In this chapter, Turkish educational system and institutional quality assessment initiatives of education are explained. And also, the relationship between educational quality assurance (QA) in Turkey and issues of effective schooling is summarised in terms of Turkish literature.

Education is widely accepted as a lifelong process. The school is an institution established in order to provide qualified education which contains complex and more abstract knowledge and ideas as well as literacy and simple numerical skills to the students. Each country has basically established education systems and educational institutions to ensure social integration, continuity and stability, and to sustain the social and cultural heritage of a society. Education in Turkey is one of the state’s basic functions according to the constitution and performed under the supervision and control of the state with the declaration of the Republic of Turkey. Ministry of National Education is responsible for the implementation of all education activities centrally managed in the Republic of Turkey. Higher Education Council (YÖK) is responsible for the management and thus the quality processes of the higher education institutions in Turkey. Two major attempts in this perspective are YÖK, which assesses the institutions with standards which are coherent with international accreditation institutions, and Higher Education Quality Council (YÖKAK), an independent and specific council which is established by YÖK. YÖK and YÖKAK are governmental-based quality-assessment institutions. Association for Evaluation and Accreditation of Teacher Colleges’ Educational Programs (EPDAD) is also an independent institution for quality assessment of education faculties which focusses on teacher training and education. The purpose of EPDAD is to strengthen the student learning in formal training and to ensure the quality standards for candidate teachers. Any undergraduate programme which meets the standards of EPDAD is accredited for three years. Standards of EPDAD are detailed in this chapter.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which higher education institutions can benefit from the implementation of benchmarking practices. Thus, the aim of this research is to point out the structure and applications of quality improvement, by providing evidence for understanding the implementation of benchmarking as a competing tool for excellence in higher education institutions.

The methodology followed in this paper is based on a method approach, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Research is based on 20 case studies of universities committed to excellence around the world. Data collection was accomplished by a well-designed questionnaire on how quality improvement can be accomplished through benchmarking practices.

The findings of this research indicate that benchmarking can improve academic excellence by means of comparison and assessment. The study finds that process performance measurements can bring considerable outcomes of enhancement, improvement and transformation in higher education systems.

This research on benchmarking in higher education institutions provides exemplar standpoints and practices for the pursuit of excellence in educational organizations, in order to gain additional knowledge and paradigm on quality improvement that can lead to excellence. Considering the population of rankings worldwide, the main idea is linked to benchmarking and the acceptance of being compared to others in the sector.

The value of this paper lies in the identification and presentation of several ideas and tools which can successfully be applied to higher education institutions in order to achieve excellence by using benchmarking practices.