This volume is the third in a series of publications that seeks to analyse the education indicators developed through the OECD/UNESCO World Education Indicators (WEI) programme. The volume examines both the investments and returns to education and human capital.

As individuals and nations increasingly recognize that high levels of knowledge and skills are essential to success, spending on education becomes more an investment into a collective future, rather than an individual consumption. Investment in human capital has thus moved to the centre of strategies to promote economic prosperity, better skilled labour forces, social cohesion and other positive individual and social benefits. However, public and private resources remain limited. The challenge of expanding educational opportunities while maintaining their quality and equitable distribution is linked to education finance. This report brings together crucial evidence on the role of human capital and education in fostering economic well-being. It also considers the benefits of public and private stakeholders in education. A national statistical profile that sets out selected contextual and finance indicators together with a comprehensive statistical annex covering both WEI and OECD countries completes the analysis. The countries participating in the World Education Indicators Programme (WEI) are: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Malaysia, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines the Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay andZimbabwe.

This volume sheds light on the comparative performance of education systems, with an analysis that extends to the financial and human resources invested in education, how education and learning systems operate and evolve, and to the returns to educational investment.

This volume sheds light on the comparative performance of education systems, with an analysis that extends to the financial and human resources invested in education, how education and learning systems operate and evolve, and the returns to educational investment.

The 2002 edition of Education at a Glance -- OECD Indicators provides information on the output of educational institutions and the impact of learning, the policy levers that shape educational outcomes and how education systems operate and evolve, and the human and financial resources invested.

Despite a low enrollment rate in higher education of 3 percent on average, in comparison with 8 percent in countries with comparable levels of development, Francophone African countries are currently facing an immense challenge in terms of numbers. The increased social demand associated with the progress made in universal primary enrollment and the increase in secondary enrollment could cause the student population to grow from 800,000 in 2004 to approximately 2 million in 2015, and to double the coverage. This increase exacerbates the financial problems of higher education institutions and mi.

The contemporary finance deals mainly with multilateral and multi-counterparty transactions. Islamic Jurisprudence (Fiqh) has yet to develop its conceptualization of this modality of financing. Thus far, it has become a norm for large financing projects to rely on a complex structure of interconnected bilateral contracts that in totality becomes opaque, complex and costly. An unfortunate result of the unavailability of an efficient Fiqhi model applicable to modern multilateral and multi-counterparty contracts has been the fact that the present Islamic finance has been forced to replicate conventional risk-transfer (interest rate based) debt contracts thus drawing severe criticisms of duplicating conventional finance. In 2012, a gathering of some of the Muslim world’s most prominent experts in Jurisprudence (Fuqaha) and economists issued the Kuala Lumpur Declaration (Fatwa) in which they identified risk sharing as the essence of Islamic finance. The Declaration opened the door for a new Fiqh approach to take the lead in developing the jurisprudence of multilateral and multi-counterparty transactions. This Declaration (Fatwa) provides a prime motivation to search for a comprehensive model of risk sharing that can serve as an archetypal contract encompassing all potential contemporary financial transactions. From the perspective of Islamic Jurisprudence (Fiqh), the technicalities of the concept of risk sharing in contemporary finance have yet to be defined in Islamic literature. This book attempts to clarify and shed light on these technicalities from the perspective of Fiqh. It is a comprehensive study that relies on the fundamental Islamic sources to establish a theoretical and practical perspective of Fiqh encompassing risk-sharing Islamic finance as envisioned in the Kuala Lumpur Declaration of 2012. This new paradigm should lead to a more efficient approach to multilateral and multi-counterparty Islamic contracts which, here-to-fore has been lacking in the current configuration of Islamic finance.