Bangkok, Thailand, March 16th, 2013

Over the last 25 years there has been a revolution in the financing of higher education. In 1989 Australia adopted the first national income contingent loan (ICL) to be collected by the internal revenue service and this has been followed by similar higher education financing policy changes in New Zealand, South Africa, England, Ethiopia, South Africa and Hungary, and in 2012 a Bill was presented to the US Congress aimed at instituting a similar conversion in the US college loans system. It is well known that ICL offer the advantages to students of both income smoothing and default insurance, and one way to think of the policy is as a risk management instrument for government. The IEA Roundtable has been motivated by an interest in the adoption of ICL in a host of other social and economic policy areas. Considerable research has already been undertaken with respect to the use of ICL for the financing or repayment of: paid parental leave; low level criminal fines; R & D investments; housing cost relief for low income families; legal aid; the collection of brain drain taxes from immigrants from low income countries, and a host of other potential applications. The Roundtable brings together some of the foremost economists of the world to examine the costs and benefits of the use of ICL in areas outside of higher education; a critical aim is to explore the circumstances in which ICL is appropriate and inappropriate as a policy instrument. For voluntary schemes difficulties are apparent with respect to both moral hazard and adverse selection and the Roundtable seeks to examine these issues in full.
Here you can find the program.