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Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | When the casino resorts applied for the first licenses to operate in Macau, one of the commitments that they made was to serve the Macau society. Many of them have honoured those commitments outstandingly well, and continue to do so, and in ways too many and diverse to list here.

This contribution to the special issue is an historical account of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field trip in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the head of the first Extension Service of a major Brazilian university in the early 1960s gave Freire and his collaborators the space and time to experiment with the today world famous literacy method bearing his name. The concept of ‘Field of Cultural Production’ (Bourdieu) is used to elucidate better Freire and his team’s avant-gardist production within the spaces opened up by Brazil’s popular movements in the early sixties. The contribution shows how the ‘Paulo Freire System’ developed in the praxis of a cultural movement and received its academic consecration in an incremental and eclectic style.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | The late psychologist, business and management consultant Edward de Bono gained a worldwide reputation for ‘lateral thinking’, which included his ‘six thinking hats’ and ‘tools for thinking’. Though his work is arguably only plausible pseudoscience, his ‘tools for thinking’ remain interesting. Consider some of these from his Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT), in approaching planning, e.g.: CAF (Consider All Factors); EBS (Examine Both Sides); and OPV (consider Other People’s Views). Here I apply them to Macau.

It has become increasingly clear that the early use of decomposition for addition is associated with later mathematical achievement. This study examined how younger children execute a base-10 decomposition strategy to solve complex arithmetic (e.g. two-digit addition). 24 addition problems in two modalities (WA: Written Arithmetic; OA: Oral Arithmetic) with sums less than 100 were administered to 22 Japanese and 22 Singaporean 6-year-old kindergarteners. Our findings reveal that they were able to solve complex addition. For instance, Japanese kindergarteners tended to solve complex arithmetic using base-10 decomposition across the modality, whereas Singaporean kindergarteners used standard algorithms and basic counting to solve complex WA and OA problems, respectively. We speculate that Japanese kindergarteners might have a clearer understanding of the base-10 concept and were able to use this knowledge more readily than Singaporean kindergarteners. Mathematical experiences in kindergarten and number-naming systems have been put forward as two of the crucial contributors for such cross-cultural differences. This study also provides new directions for future research on the understanding of the base-10 concept and its application among young children.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | Here we are, at the start of a new academic year in Macau’s higher education (HE). What will students learn? What kind of people are the institutions turning out? For example, look at the thousands of students studying business and technology in Macau, the big recruiters in HE.

Macau, MNA, Opinion | The Macau government recently approved its first reading of a new bill to attract Macau locals to return to Macau to work. Simultaneously, Macau’s Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture was reported as saying that if Macau could create a better environment and conditions, then ‘local talents who are abroad will surely be interested in returning to Macau’.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | Business 101. When companies plan their business models, typically they must consider, amongst other matters: their products and/or services; demand; market(s) and their environments (economic, political, cultural, social); existing, potential, and likely competition; start-up and ongoing costs and expenses; emergency funding; marketing and promotion; income streams, revenue, and delayed profit; sales; distribution; cash flow; profit margins, gross and net; liabilities; risk analysis, evaluation, and handling; constraints and the ‘what if’ factor; flexibility, adaptability, and adjustment.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | The world is full of interesting paradoxes that befuddle the mind. Or, as the delightful chapter in Alice in Wonderland put it: ‘‘curiouser and curiouser!’’.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | Across the world, a civil service job pays well and is secure. Not bad if you can get it, with competitive entry to it by hordes of applicants.

Since the launch of the One Belt and One Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the internationalisation of China’s tertiary education has entered a new stage. Central to the BRI is investment and strategic planning for talent cultivation, knowledge production, and transmission. This paper explains how the BRI redirects, reinforces, and intensifies China’s strategic planning and actions for internationalising its education. It adopts a policy analysis approach and reviews three key aspects of development and shifting emphasis of internationalisation under the impact of the BRI: international education networks along the Six BRI Economic Corridors, vocational colleges as new players in international education, and promotion of the Chinese language as a new global language. The analysis captures an important moment in which international education processes are being visibly altered through China’s strategies to take the lead in economic globalisation and to compete for a central place in the world via the BRI.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | Macau used to be very appealing to expatriates from across the world. Its low tax rate (and zero tax for low-paid expatriates), blends of cultures, business opportunities, life style, history, unique features and a host of other attractions fuelled an ongoing supply of foreign nationals to this small, unusual city. It is an interestingly idiosyncratic place in which to live. For many expatriates, Macau has been home, in many cases reaching back more than one generation. This is perhaps unsurprising, as people here are typically exquisitely polite, a delight to be with, and very accepting. Its acceptance of differences in values is an example to countries across the world. Macau is a safe place to live.

Macau, Macau Business, MAG, MB, MB Featured, Opinion | Macau should be proud of its protective handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, as it has managed to contain its spread, and many of its citizens have been able to lead a more normal life than in other parts of the world. We should be grateful for this.