Higher Education and Global Poverty: University Partnerships and ...

sparked innovations in the industrial and agricultural arenas, producing knowledge and improving techniques in various fields. German universities have been centers of knowledge production for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries from the late nineteenth century onward (Mowery and Rosenberg 1998).

In the United States, the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 provided colleges and universities with land in exchange for their commitment to pursuing agriculture and other applied sciences; in a similar vein, the Hatch Act of 1887 funded agricultural research to assist rural communities in developing better farm practices (MacGarvie and Furman 2005). This legislation highlights the U.S. government's interest in using higher education to benefit the general population through the development and dissemination of knowledge. The emphasis on the contribution made by knowledge accumulation to the expansion of gross domestic product (GDP) reflects a particular model of growth in economic theory (Lucas 1989; Romer 1989). Yusuf argued that “most of the technological advances that have economic consequences can be traced indirectly or directly to universities, either through the training provided, the knowledge spillovers, or the actual research conducted” (2007, 9).

Major sectors of national economies have shifted from being industry-based to knowledge-based, driven by scientific and technological advances—especially in wealthy countries such as Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others. The industry-based economy has not disappeared, but a new form of the global economy that often assumes the more dominant position has emerged. To a large extent, the new knowledge-based economy reflects the growing power of computerized, network-based processes connected to the production and management of information and knowledge. This world-wide transformation is represented in the literature by an emerging group of descriptors, including expressions such as “new economy,” “information age,” “network society,” “knowledge society,” and so forth (Carnoy, et al. 1993; Castells 1996, 1997; Morrow and Torres 2000; Peters and Besley 2006; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Stromquist 2002; World Bank 2002). This global economic transformation is closely tied