Regarding Professor Lee's post, the same is more or less true in   
Taiwan. HOT struggles in both countries partly because the Ministries of   
Education largely control the status and incomes in higher education.   
The reason for this is the former desire by the military dictatorships   
to indoctrinate. After democratization, the top bureaucrats and profs   
were without direction but continued to receive lots of cash. The result   
was tailor-made for rent-seekers. To institutionalize the rent seeking,   
the agents of the new democratic governments installed bureaucratic   
rules. Being almost totally unable to independently evaluate quality,   
they needed something to count. This was made so much easier by SSCI.  
    In addition the bureaucratic accounters, the HOT strugglers face the   
brute fact that most other economists (their "colleagues"), not being   
well-versed in English yet having studied abroad, cannot even read   
history of thought papers. This, in turn, is due to the low language   
requirements for econ majors of American and European universities,   
particularly as they apply to foreign students.  
    It seems to me that the solution is privatization. You might be   
interested in a paper that I sent to the the Taiwan government regarding   
the issue. The "progressive"government regarded it as too radical, which   
I am sure it is.  
  
http://knight.fcu.edu.tw/~gunning/taiwan/vouchtwn.htm  
  
Pat Gunning