【正文】 The Economics and Politics of Cost Sharing in Higher Education: Comparative Perspectives D. I Cost Sharing in Higher Education The term costsharing, in reference to higher education, begins with an assumption that the costs of higher education in all countries and in all situations can be viewed as emanating from four principal parties: (1) the government, or taxpayers。 (2) parents。 (3) students。 and/or (4) individual or institutional The governement. Most economists in marketoriented economies prefer to view the source of public revenue not as “government,” but as people who pay taxes. Taxes can be paid by most citizens directly and visibly, as in taxes upon earnings, property, retail sales, general consumption, or special goods such as gasoline, cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, in line travel, or imported goods. Or, taxes can be paid indirectly and largely invisibly. Such indirect taxes, largely invisible to the average citizen, may originate with taxes on businesses or enterprises that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on the products they eventually buynot unlike any other kind of retail sales, or special excise, taxes. If prices are governmentally controlled, as used to be the case in most Socialist systems, and if the enterprises are therefore unable to pass along their taxes in the form of higher prices, these enterprise, or value added, taxes must instead be borne by employees in the form of lower wages and salaries. Finally, the government may take purchasing power from citizens not by taxation at all, but by merely printing money, thus shifting purchasing power to the government via deficitdriven inflation and the resulting erosion of the actual value of wages and assets. (Governments may attempt to tax only the rich, or only the large multinational corporations, or only their export earning extractive industries. But such taxation is very difficult, and in the absence of enormous oil or other mineral earnings to confiscate and/or tax, most governmental expenditures are borne, in the end, by the average citizen / taxpayer.) Parents. The second party to costsharing is the parents, who may pay some of the costs of higher education through payment of tuition, or bear some of the costs of student living, sometimes by keeping the student at home. Parents can cover these extra costs from their current ine, or in part from past savings, or even in part through borrowingthat is, drawing on future earnings. Grandparents or other members of an extended family, or even members of a village or a church, can also be “parents” hen it es to supporting a student. Students. The third party to share the burden of higher educational costs is the student, who can bear some of the costs through termtime or summer vacation earnings, or through loans. The loans, in turn, can be paid back when the student has graduated and is employed, like any regular loan, in monthly installments, or repaid through deductions that the employer removes from the graduate’s pay (like the withholding of ine taxes, or contributions to an insurance or pension fund) and forwards to the lender. Repayments can also be ine contingent, or limited to a certain percentage of earnings. Or in very similar fashion, the graduate can repay the loan (assuming the loan was borrowed from, and therefore owed to, the government) through an ine surtax, or additional tax on ine until the loan has been repaid, including the contracted percentage interest. In all cases—conventional equal installment, installments graduated over time, or ine contingentwhat is most critical to the student (or at least ought to be in an informed and rational world) is not the form of the loan or of the repayment obligation, but (1) the discounted present value of the total anticipated payments and (2) the number of years to repaywhich, in association with 1 defines the monthly repayment burden. Individual or institutional donors. The last party to costshari