Search results

The purpose of this paper is to untangle the domestic and international factors that have affected policy making and implementation of the Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), particularly in education, at different times in its history.

The study is based on analysis of governmental policy documents and reports, minutes of ODA consultative meetings, and statistical data on Japanese financial and technical developmental assistance. The major methodology was discourse analysis of primary documents; secondary sources supplement this.

Japan was the first non-western Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) member and has always been in the ambivalent position of being both a DAC member and an Asian latecomer. As the Education for All paradigm took the ground, Japanese ODA to the education sector has shifted to the primary education from Technical and Vocational Education and Training and higher education from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. While the global trend is clear in Japanese ODA, it has always stressed the importance of establishing and demonstrating the “Japanese model” in ODA policy documents and practices. The sensitive balance between the demand to harmonize with mainstream aid modalities and the drive to demonstrate uniqueness characterize Japanese educational aid.

While many important works examined the decision-making mechanism and philosophies of Japanese educational ODA, this paper contextualizes governmental programs in the intersection between domestic factors – bureaucratic, political, and societal – and international influence. It clarifies the changing relationships between Japan and western and Asian countries in determining its agendas and directions from the 1960s to the present.

The purpose of this paper is to compare two UNESCO reports on educational development in Cambodia, one from 1955 and the other from 2010, in order to understand how the global education development agenda has impacted shadow education.

The study is conducted through a textual comparison of two UNESCO reports written 50 years apart.

Although the educational problems facing Cambodia were similar in both reports, the recommendations differed in important ways. The 1955 report advised the country to expand slowly access to education in order to maintain quality, while the 2010 recommended quickly expanding access. A major difference found in the reports regarded the issue of fees in schooling, which did not appear in 1955. School fees in Cambodia are typically extracted through the system of private tutoring, known in the academic literature as shadow education. Such an insight, this paper argues, suggests that the difference in development approach between the two reports is one of the reasons shadow education has flourished in the country.

Through a historical comparison of development efforts in one country, it becomes clear that the education development agenda is partly to blame for the rise of shadow education.

Halal supply chain management (HSCM) is an emerging research area and is in the early stage of evolution. This study aims to identify 11 critical factors towards effective management of a Halal supply chain (HSC) and provides a framework for the HSCM by evaluating Halal practices' impact on sustainability performance measures empirically.

A structured questionnaire-based survey has been carried out to collect data for analysis. The statistical analysis is accomplished by exploiting merits of factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM).

The results imply that out of 11 critical factors, nine factors on effective management of the HSC are statistically significant, and impacts of two critical factors are positive but statistically insignificant. In the structural model, the path coefficient of all success indicators are positive and statistically significant. In terms of the path coefficient of sustainable performance measures of HSC, all three dimensions, economic, environmental and social, are positive and statistically significant.

The research extends Halal and supply chain management's literature by proposing Halal as a standard quality control system, as it focuses on wholesome consumption. Effective management of the HSC is positively related to the firms' sustainable performance, thus helping managers make the organisation sustainable in the long term.

The research extends the literature of Halal and supply chain management by proposing Halal as a standard quality control system, which focuses on wholesome consumption. Effective management of the HSC is positively related to the sustainable performance of the firms, thus helps managers in making the organisation sustainable in the long term.

The result of the study underlines that sustainable performance measures are embedded in HSCM. This research develops a new paradigm in the research of HSCM and sustainability.