As commentators have pointed out, as a regulator for HE following the enactment of HERA, the OfS represents both the increasing marketization of HE and the growth of a sector of commercial HE providers: The creation of a full-blown market for higher education with its own regulator the Office for Students—heralded by the recent Higher Education and Research Act, is now nearly complete.
These changes include, but not limited to, internationalization, massification, diversity, ICT revolutions, increased competition and collaboration, marketization, and new teaching and financing methods.
The core motivating rationale for marketization is that increased competition within a sector will stimulate efficiency gains.
Though with increased government investment, the existing operation status quo of marketization will undoubtedly continue.
According to market transition theory (Nee 1989), due to systematic differences in income determination between a market economy and a redistributive economy, marketization will necessarily increase income returns from human capital and depreciate the value of political capital at the same time.
Responding to the media marketization process, editors have taken the initiative in reorienting themselves to the needs of the market in order to increase their financial resources by all legitimate means, while profit-making becomes an important aim.
The market-centred approach states the increasing importance of education as the new upward mobility channel in the transitional society (Nee 1989, 1991; Cao and Nee 2000; Nee and Matthews 1996), which naturally leads to the hypothesis of the shift in the concentration of highly-educated job seekers from adherents to adventurers as marketization progressed.
The director of MASCC, Mr. Xu, argued that changing the current water institutions and increasing service quality were the most important reasons and objectives for embarking on marketization in the water sector in Maanshan, rather than bringing in nongovernmental capital (personal communication 2004).
This article reviews developments in private sector involvement in China's water management and assesses whether expected results of marketization in the Chinese water sector have been met: raising investment for infrastructure, increasing service coverage and improved efficiency in China's water supply and wastewater treatment.
Although the specifics vary by country setting, these have often included pressures towards marketization of health services [ 4], civil service restructuring [ 5], decentralization [ 6, 7] and an overall trend towards increasing geographical and socioeconomic disparities in many countries.
