What skill-development strategies should developing countries adopt to compete successfully in the international markets of the 21st century? This innovative new book provides a blend of theory and case studies which shed new light on this important question. It approaches the question from two angles. It considers, first, how skill development affects a country's international competitiveness and, secondly, what a government should do to develop a country's skills. It concludes that development of skills is necessary for a country to make the transition from primary exports to manufactures and from labour-intensive to skill-intensive manufacturing. For this purpose, it is argued an education system that recognizes the return to improvements in quality, and a training system that internalizes externalities and prevents market failure are needed. Issues explored include: the arguments for an activist skill-development policy (with particular emphasis on education of girls and women); the transition from cheap labour to skill-based competitiveness; human resources and structural adjustment; and different approaches to training for countries and enterprises at different levels of technological development. Skill Development for International Competitiveness will be of interest to academics, students and researchers in the fields of development studies, development economics, the economics of education and training and labour economics. Policymakers and planners responsible for policies on human resource development and employment and overall development strategy will also find this a vital source of information.

Edward Schroder Prior designed the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement (St Andrew's Church, Roker), perfected the popular butterfly plan in his houses, and published what is still the seminal work on medieval gothic art in England in 1900. Highly regarded by critics such as Ian Nairn, Prior is sometimes considered to have narrowly missed out on a place in the architectural pantheon of his age, alongside contemporaries such as Charles Voysey and William Lethaby. The result of extensive archival and field research, Edward Prior - Arts and Crafts Architect sheds new light on Prior's architecture, life and scholarship. Extensively illustrated, it showcases Prior's work in colour, including many of his architectural drawings and photographs of most of his extant buildings. Prior is the missing link of the Arts and Crafts Movement, in both a theoretical and a practical sense, as he was possibly the only practitioner who genuinely translated the artistic theories of Ruskin and Morris into architectural reality. He went on to found the School of Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 1912.

'Zero Carbon' is an abstract concept for most people, but we have lived energy-profiligate lifestyles for too long on finite fossil-fuel resources. We now face potential environmental catastrophe from climate change and global warming, with a continuing exponentially expanding global population that doubles every four decades. The capacity of the planet to reabsorb carbon dioxide is about two to three tonnes of carbon equivalent per person at current population levels of seven billion and therefore there is a desperate need for us to reduce our carbon footprint. One way of helping to achieve this is to live in a zero-carbon house, and this will become legislation in the UK for new homes by 2016.

Vocational education is often ignored during discussions of secondary education reform even though it accounts for between 25 percent and 79 percent of upper secondary enrollment in the former centrally-planned countries of the European Union. Based on information, data, and feedback from most of these countries, this paper develops a set of propositions about vocational education reform, not with a view to prescribing a detailed 'one-size-fits-all' strategy, but rather it derives some principles that continued reform of vocational education could take into account, to the benefit of fiscal efficiency.

'Higher Education Financing in the New EU Member States' summarizes the experiences to date of the new EU countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia the EU8) in the reform of higher education systems in a period of growing demand; changing patters of access; rapid expansion and increased participation rates; and an apparent dilution of average quality. The study discusses the growing experience with a variety of financing mechanisms in EU8 countries, drawing on detailed country case studies, and seeks to develop some useful lessons from experience, mindful that each country will continue to develop its own solution based on national priorities.