Innovative ways to finance education and their relation to lifelong learning.

This paper provides three pieces of analysis. First, an economic theory account of the reasons that governments may have to intervene in the market for education is offered. This account is based on insights from both the neoclassical (market) paradigm and the information paradigm. Second, it evaluates different proposals for the financing of (higher) education found in the academic literature. The proposals centre around three themes: more reliance on tuition fees in higher education, a shift in the student aid system from schemes dominated by grants towards loans systems, and different types of voucher models. The third piece of analysis relates to selected country examples of policy proposals and developments. These developments and proposals are judged in terms of the analyses in the previous two themes.