The Asia-Pacific Region is the most rapidly developing economic region in the world and many of the region's nations are becoming economic and political leaders on the world stage. Behind the social, political and economic growth of the region has been the recognition by many governments of the critical importance of higher education as a driver of the global knowledge economy. Over the past decade, not only has higher education expanded rapidly in nearly every country of the region, it has also undergone fundamental change and transformation. Many countries in the Asia-Pacific are committed to developing 'world-class' universities to rival those of the Europe and North America and to substantially increase the proportion of their populations who have completed a higher education qualification. The scale of higher education development in countries such as China dwarfs that occurring elsewhere. In recent years there have been an increasing number of scholarly articles chronicling and analysing the transformation of Asia-Pacific higher education, and this is the first comprehensive collection of research publications, and only includes scholarly, peer-reviewed articles from leading researchers in the field of higher education policy and research. The region supplies the majority of the world's international higher education students, and countries like China are overtaking western countries in terms of research output and publications. This publication will appeal to a broad readership both within and without the region, to politicians and their advisers, higher education policy makers, institutional leaders, students of higher education and research policy, research managers and funding agencies, academics teaching courses on higher education, education aid agencies and NGOs, and the general higher education policy research community.