Education and international trade: impacts of trade in services liberalization on the regulation of higher education in Brazil

Abstract

The internationalization of education created a market with great commercial potential, in which education assumes characteristics of a service. This scenario brings with it the risk that trade, if it becomes the dominant criterion in defining educational policies, causes erosion of their public services prerogatives, minimizing the adequacy to the local context, and to national and regional needs. In Brazil, the sector accounts for over 200 negotiations recently and encompasses the most profitable companies in the Brazilian stock exchange, some of them with more than 500,000 enrollments. The possibility of the resumption of services negotiations in the multilateral environment and the increasing number of regional trade agreements emphasize the need to determine how international trade affects specific sensitive sectors. On one hand, from the domestic perspective, the goal is to prevent that trade in services liberalization hinders development and social inclusion policies linked to education; on the other, under the international perspective, the objective is to present to international economic law a different set of concerns and values to be taken into consideration. The relevance of the proposal lies on the research object, yet underexplored, as well as on the analytical perspective adopted. The proposed objective is to analyze in depth the relationship between domestic and international rules from the Brazil perspective, a developing country, and to promote a wide data collection to map the reality of the higher education sector in Brazil and the positions of the main governmental and private actors on the sector's liberalization. The collection of primary material described (interviews, legislative domestic documents and preferential trade agreements) will be completed prior to leaving for the overseas period. The information processing and interpretation will require a deeper methodological and theoretical capacity, and the chosen institute responds to these demands. Besides having researchers with extensive experience in qualitative research methods in social sciences, the King's Brazil Institute will allow me to receive contributions and criticisms from a consolidated research environment with extensive experience in similar researches. (AU)