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This paper describes the global knowledge economy (the k-economy), comprised by (1) open source knowledge flows and (2) commercial markets in intellectual property and knowledge-intensive goods. Like all economy the global knowledge economy is a site of production. It is also social and cultural, taking the form of a one-world community mediated by the Internet. The k-economy has developed with extraordinary rapidity, particularly the open source component; which, consistent with the economic character of knowledge as a public good, appears larger than the commercial intellectual property component. But how do the chaotic open source flows of knowledge, with no evident tendency towards predictability let alone towards equilibrium, become reconciled with a world of governments, economic markets, national and university hierarchies, and institutions that routinely require stability and control in order to function? The article argues that in the k-economy, knowledge flows are vectored by a system of status production that assigns unequal values to knowledge and arranges it in ordered patterns. The new system for regulating the value of public good knowledge includes institutional league tables, research rankings, publication and citation metrics, journal hierarchies, and other comparative output measures such as outcomes of student learning.

From 1990 to 2003, Australia's share of the global market in cross-border degrees grew from 1% to 9%. Full fee-paying foreign students now constitute one quarter of enrolments, and education is Australia's third largest services export. Positioned as an Anglo-American system on the edge of Asia, Australia has differentiated itself from the United States and United Kingdom on price, location, safety, and climate, not academic content. The supply side keys to growth are deregulation and prolonged reductions in the public funding of universities. However, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University survey of research performance finds that Australia is less strong in research than cross-border degrees. Australia's policy may have negative implications for its longer-term global standing and limit the range of position-taking strategies available to its universities. These themes are explored in the context of the emerging worldwide market and Australian policy changes that have enhanced institutional stratification. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure, and 11 notes.)

Brexit has weakened collaboration between UK higher education institutions and their EU counterparts, with negative implications for UK resources and capacity, without leading to new global strategies and opportunities. In 2020 the UK government withdrew from the Erasmus student mobility scheme and introduced the Turing scheme. While Erasmus had supported both outward UK student mobility and inward movement from Europe, Turing supports only outward mobility. In 2021–2022 the cessation of UK tuition fee arrangements for EU citizens entering UK degrees led to a sharp drop in numbers. Collaborative European research programmes have been crucial in building the infrastructure and network centrality of UK science and in attracting EU citizen researchers, but at the time of writing future UK participation as a non-member country was unresolved. The long uncertainty about this, coupled with the cessation of free people movement, have triggered the exit of some UK-based researchers and declines in UK researchers' competitiveness in European grants, EU doctoral students and established researchers entering UK, and EU country citizens as a proportion of UK academic staff. In addition, the loss of access to European structural funds has slowed the modernisation of UK higher education institutions and reduced their social contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledge flows and collegial collaboration and has partial autonomy. Four different interpretive frameworks (narratives) have evolved to explain global science: science as an expanding cross-border network; science as an arms race between competing nations; science as a global market of competing 'World-Class Universities'; and science as a centre-periphery hierarchy in which emerging countries are permanently constrained by Euro-American dominance. The paper reviews each narrative in relation to the literature, especially in scientometrics, and empirical tendencies in global science, tracked in secondary data derived from bibliometric collections. While each narrative contains at least a grain of truth, each also conflicts with the others and each is radically insufficient. A better explanation of the drivers of global science combines (1) flat open networked relations with (2) the inequalities and closures shaped by global hegemony, arbitrarily modified by (3) national governments and specific resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of the AJE is focused on international education, globalisation and identities in schooling and higher education in the nations of the Asia-Pacific. Two of the papers concern [...]

This paper evaluates the performance of national higher education systems in 48 countries as measured with 20 variables grouped under the four headings of Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. Rankings within each module are then combined into an overall ranking that is topped by the United States followed by Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark. Relationships between different attributes are explored. Countries ranked highest on output tend to be ranked highly on resources. Research output is correlated with government funding, especially expenditure on research and development (R&D). The impact of the policy and regulatory environment is also examined. The weakest national systems are those with low government funding but high government control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper explores the dynamics of competition in higher education. National competition and global competition are distinct, but feed into each other. Higher education produces ‘positional goods’ (Hirsch 1976) that provide access to social prestige and income-earning. Research universities aim to maximise their status as producers of positional goods. This status is a function of student selectivity plus research performance. At system-level competition bifurcates between exclusivist elite institutions that produce highly value positional goods, where demand always exceeds supply and expansion is constrained to maximise status; and mass institutions (profit and non-profit) characterised by place-filling and expansion. Intermediate universities are differentiated between these poles. In global competition, the networked open information environment has facilitated (1) the emergence of a world-wide positional market of elite US/UK universities; and (2) the rapid development of a commercial mass market led by UK and Australian universities. Global competition is vectored by research capacity. This is dominated by English language, especially US universities, contributing to the pattern of asymmetrical resources and one-way global flows. The paper uses Australia as its example of system segmentation and global/national interface. It closes by reflecting on a more balanced global distribution of capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the rapid growth and improvement of science in China since Deng Xiaoping's reforms in the 1980s and especially in the last two decades, situating the achievement and its limitations in the contexts of both the global science system, and national policy and strategy. The key is the effective combination of national science with global science. Science in China has worked to global norms while remaining nested in national government and Sinic governance, in which Confucianism and Legalism are combined with Leninism. The paper reflects on trends in investment in R&D, the number of published papers, discipline balance, national and global networking, and policies on cross-border partnerships and mobility. China has established a strong autonomous position at world level in science that is partly separated from the intensively networked Euro-American systems but has benefitted especially from a mutually productive relationship with the United States. However, that relationship is now in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]