ABSTRACT
It is often supposed that in education, as in most other sectors of the economy, foreign providers face regulatory regimes that are much more burdensome than for local providers. Despite the liberalization and deregulation of service sectors in most economies over the past couple of decades, education would seem to be a special case; given the strategic importance of education in supporting economic growth no country wants to have to import education from abroad. It would make sense, therefore, that local providers would be strategically protected from foreign competition and that barriers facing foreign providers in education would persist long after they have been dissolved in other service sectors. Such arguments have been put forward by union movements across the world, and by some developing-country governments, but by and large the trend is in the other direction. In this chapter we argue that transnational providers in many ways are less constrained than local providers, for two broad reasons. First, their very transnationality has allowed them to avoid some of the most restrictive aspects of national regulatory frameworks. Second, most governments have seen foreign providers either as a means of building capacity or of enriching the range of providers and the status of a national system.
