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The geography of trade in services is becoming increasingly important for a developing country such as Malaysia. But, present discussion on trade in education services, in particular, higher education and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in Malaysia is rather limited and takes a short-term perspective. This is especially so with respect to the analysis of the impact of the GATS negotiations on the Malaysian higher education system. This article discusses Malaysia's current negotiating position insofar as trade in higher education services is concerned. Malaysia's prospects of gaining from trade in higher education services are analyzed.

Today's conservative movement for the reform of public education in the United States, and in much of the world, is based on the prevailing view that public education is in a state of emergency and in need of restructuring due to its own internal failures. In contrast, I shall argue that the decay of public education is mainly a product of externally imposed contradictions that are inherent to schooling in capitalist society, heightened in our time by conditions of economic stagnation in the mature capitalist economies, and by the effects of the conservative reform movement itself. The corporate-driven onslaught on students, teachers, and public schools-symbolized in the United States by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation-is to be explained not so much by the failure of the schools themselves, but by the growing failures of the capitalist system, which now sees the privatization of public education as central to addressing its larger malaise.

The theory of academic capitalism is used to explore US and EU marketization trajectories. Comparisons are made along the following dimensions: creation and expansion of intermediating organizations external to universities that promote closer relations between universities and markets; interstitial organizations that emerge from within universities that intersect various market oriented projects; narratives, discourses and social technologies that promote marketization and competition; expanded managerial capacity; new funding streams for research and programs close to the market; and new circuits of knowledge that move away from peer review and professional judgment as arbiters of excellence. We also consider the status of fields not closely integrated with external markets, and see fragmentation of the humanities, fine arts and (some) social sciences to be a sign of research universities marketization.

If managerialism points to the ideological foundations and bureaucratisation of contemporary education, marketisation signals its commodification, image and exchange. This paper brings to bear the prevailing influence of marketisation on education. It begins with a brief description of the European context and development of learning outcomes, and outlines the (economic) rationale for their existence. It then sets out to explore the logic of learning outcomes, asking: what is lost in the process of education being exchanged as a commodity? We argue that marketisation, through its constituent concepts of commodification, image and exchange, seduces as an education 'spectacle' and ultimately shapes individuals' value positions. In essence, marketisation, grounded in contemporary neoliberal economics, privileges quantitative, at the expense of genuinely qualitative, educational substance. Further, we argue that learning outcomes are a simulacrum: like other signifiers of commodities, they appear meaningful (although they do exhibit meaning) but are ultimately incapable of delivering what they promise: transferable skills, at most, but not education. Ethical consequences are stark and signal the loss of the intrinsic value of education - a loss that begins with its own commodification.

"The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, 'academic development' has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge."