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In an article in the higher education section of The Australian, he castigates these institutions for being ‘large public works projects with guaranteed lifetime employment.’  \nSpecifically, Professor Schwartz wants higher education to be competitive and, when possible, provided by the private sector. What is more, he believes this to be inevitable because ‘higher education is increasingly an international enterprise’ and, therefore, will be more and more subject to the pressures of deregulation and privatisation. He is calling for, at the very least, a system in which public institutions compete ‘on a level playing field’ with private ones. The ‘level playing field’ he has in mind is equal access to public funds.  \nIn subsequent issues of The Australian Professor Schwartz’s prescriptions for universities in Australia did not go unchallenged. Clearly, despite official competition policy, and massive privatisation and deregulation exercises in Australia (as elsewhere in wealthy countries), considerable support still exists for higher education remaining in the public domain.  \nThe important fact in any democratic society is that points of view like those of Professor Schwartz are debated and discussed before acted upon. But discussions of this sort could become irrelevant in the future as a result of changes in international trade laws. Professor Schwartz’s dream could come true without specific national policy changes — and changes that would be subject to public debate and scrutiny.  \nThe immediate threat to democratic decision-making and the public provision of services is through the General Agreements on Trade in Services (GATS) . Negotiations atthe World Trade Organisation (WTO) to extend the GATS began in February 2000 with specific objectives to increase market access of private service providers to industries that are now in the public sector. While all government  \nservices are implicated, this article will focus on the effects for public higher education. This article will not debate the merits of public higher education, but will take these merits as its starting position for analysing the implications of the emerging global trade regime. The importance of these agreements to public education is their alarming potential to limit the role of government in the delivery of public services.  \nThe General Agreement on Trade in Services  \nUntil the WTO was created out of the last round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1994, there was no multilateral agreement on services. Trade agreements historically have been mainly about reducing tariffs and eliminating other barriers to trade (such as quotas on imports) on things that were produced in one place and sold in another. Some services, like transportation, communication and financial services, have always been traded, but social services, like education and healthcare, have generally been too place-specific to be tradeable.  \nAs the services sectors of economies have grown, and as trade in various types of services has increased, in part because of technological changes, the rules that focused only on trade in objects were deemed inadequate to meet the needs of the private sector. The normal identification of barriers to trade (eg tariffs and quotas) did not cover obstacles service companies encountered when they tried to expand their businesses into areas where the public sector dominates. The international corporations that exported services demanded and worked for new trading rules that would foster new int","cbCairaGUYz9oqbd","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCairaGUYz9oqbd","pdf",45861,"English","# Introduction\n## Critiques of public universities and competitive funding\n## GATS as a threat to democratic decision-making\n# The General Agreement on Trade in Services\n## From GATT to WTO and emergence of service rules\n## How GATS expands coverage of services\n## Implications for education systems and private providers","[{\"question\":\"What role does Professor Schwartz’s critique play in the article’s argument?\",\"answer\":\"It frames calls for making higher education competitive and increasingly subject to deregulation and privatisation, including the idea of public institutions competing with private ones on equal terms for public funding.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the article describe the immediate threat posed by GATS to democracy and public services?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that extending GATS negotiations through the WTO could make future discussions irrelevant by constraining the government’s ability to provide public services through legally binding trade rules.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the article say education and healthcare are particularly affected by GATS coverage?\",\"answer\":\"Because GATS is described as covering essentially all services and supply methods, and only fully government-provided services fall outside the rules; most education systems involve private providers or commercialisation, so they can be implicated.\"}]","The General Agreement on Trade in Services - Implications for public postsecondary education in Australia - Marjorie Griffin Cohen | PDF",1792080993,18]