Links...

Martin Wolf is Very Gloomy, and With Good Reason
from Naked Capitalism. Excerpt:
"The implicit conclusion of what Wolf and Johnson write is that we going forward need dirigiste economies and national and regional scale of types and magnitude that we have not seen before (or at least not in a very long time). In addition, the dirigisme would have to be closely co-ordinated globally."

Laura Freschi in Paying for school on $2 a day reminds us of James Tooley's work which has been discussed by several people before, for example, in India Together:School choice looms for poor students . Some seem to be using Tooley's book to push for privatization of primary education but there seem to be various choices and or a mixture of choices. From the comment by Chris Prottas in Aid Watch:
"I agree with the general enthusiasm for independent schools accountable to parents. I do have two points to be made based on the experience of private/non-profit schools in India. First, local market research (series of qualitative interviews) has shown that the “market” for education is not highly functional. Many parents equate quality with price, and will send their child to the most expensive school they can. Otherwise, they might judge a school’s quality by the amount of English the child speaks at home. While parents do realize that public schools are inferior to private schools, parents do not have good tools for sorting between different private school options. Presumably, the market would be more robust and cost-competitive if there were cost-neutral school performance (or student improvement) metrics accessible for the parents: it would certainly be better than now.

Second, while private education has the potential to greatly help many in India, I disagree with Mr Tooley that it is a solution for India’s poorest. 70% of India’s population has a per capita daily income of $ 1/ day or less. For many of these families, even school fees above 30-50 Rs a month are too much.

In order to reach these students, either NGOs or the government needs to provide schooling free of charge (either directly or through vouchers).

Private schools are truly important. However, poor countries should not be seen as markets for private-school advocates to exploit, but rather as societies with variable abilities to pay that may or may not be able to pay for an education. Private school have a place, but the emphasis should be on increasing school choice, school autonomy, and information on performance while ensuring access."
There seem to new projects being studied by James Tooley himself in colloboration with Sugata Mitra (of 'Hole in the Wall' fame) and others:
Competition, Innovation and Change in Education Markets for the Poor in Developing Countries. A preliminary article of a different nature on distance learning in post primary education here.