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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2009
The case for government support for education and training must rest not only on an assessment of how markets can fail to provide sufficient skills, but also on an evaluation of how governments can fail to rectify the deficiency. Accordingly, this chapter gives an overview of the salient market failures and government failures that must be compared before policy prescriptions can be formulated. With the British education and training system taken as an example, the chapter shows that, just as markets fail to provide adequate training, there are also good reasons why the government may be inefficient in responding to the problem.
Introduction
For more than a century, royal commissions and researchers have been pointing to the deficiencies of the British education and training (ET) system and linking it to the decline in the nation's economic competitiveness. One government after another has attempted to reform the ET system and yet concern about the skills problem has if anything intensified. And Britain is not alone. Virtually all of the main industrialized nations have attempted reforms of their ET systems in order to meet the needs of a rapidly changing global economy (Finegold, 1992b).
This chapter poses a simple question: why is it that government efforts to reform education and training so often don't work? In answering this question, I will attempt to build on the work of Wolf (1988) to think as systematically about the inadequacies of state ET policy making and the reasons which underlie government failure as economists have in analyzing the causes of market failure.
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