How Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and China Build University Endowments Differently

University endowments have long been the quiet engines of institutional wealth in American higher education, where multibillion-dollar portfolios bankroll scholarships, professorships and research. In East Asia, however, the story is far more uneven, and a new comparative study published in the journal Higher Education argues that the difference is not about generosity or fundraising talent but about the architecture of government itself. Researchers from National Taipei University of Education, National Chengchi University and Newcastle University examined how Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and China structure the legal handling, accumulation, management and oversight of donated resources, and their findings reveal a striking institutional gap between Taiwan and its neighbors.

The study, led by Yi-Hua Lin and Chien-Chih Chen of National Taipei University of Education together with Kuo-Sheng Chen of National Chengchi University and Jessica Lin of Newcastle University, deliberately avoids the most common yardstick in endowment research: the size of the fund. Instead, the authors apply policy instrument theory, a framework from political science that classifies the tools governments use to steer behavior, from compulsory mandates and legal authorization to financial incentives and voluntary, information-based nudges. Their question is configurational rather than causal: what combinations of policy instruments create the institutional conditions under which donated money can be legally separated from state budgets, accumulated over decades, professionally managed and independently audited?

Taiwan provides the study’s central puzzle. In 1999, the island introduced a university fund system intended to push public universities toward revenue diversification and financial self-responsibility, a reform widely seen as a step toward the autonomy enjoyed by universities in the United States or the United Kingdom. Yet more than two decades later, donation-based resources remain weakly institutionalized. Under Taiwan’s unified public finance framework, donations are recognized, but they are folded into the same budgeting, accounting and audit machinery that governs appropriated public funds. There is limited legal space for a gift to be set apart, invested for the long term, or managed with the strategic independence that endowment governance normally requires. The result, the authors find, is that even willing donors and willing universities operate inside a system that cannot easily hold and grow charitable capital.

The contrast with Singapore is instructive. The city-state combines compulsory, mixed and voluntary instruments into a coherent package. Legal authorization gives universities and their affiliated foundations distinct standing to receive and manage gifts; matching grant schemes multiply the value of private donations by coupling government money to philanthropic dollars; tax incentives reward donors; and audit mechanisms keep the resulting funds accountable. Singapore’s Ministry of Education has explicitly promoted alumni ties and community support for tertiary education, and institutions such as Nanyang Technological University maintain structured giving programs. The policy mix, the study argues, does not merely encourage donations, it constructs the legal and financial plumbing through which donations become durable endowment capital.

Hong Kong offers perhaps the most mature example of matching grants in the region. Through successive rounds of its Matching Grant Scheme administered under the University Grants Committee, the government has matched private donations to the eight publicly funded universities, converting philanthropic enthusiasm into enlarged endowment pools while embedding transparency and reporting requirements. A new round of a Research Matching Grant Scheme covering 2025 to 2029 extends the logic to research funding, as outlined in a 2024 proposal to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. The scheme’s design illustrates what the authors call a mixed instrument: government does not compel giving, but it changes the payoff structure so that every private dollar works harder, and it simultaneously imposes governance conditions that shape how the money is held and spent.

China presents a third configuration. University foundations have proliferated across the mainland, giving institutions dedicated legal vehicles for receiving and managing donations, supported by tax-exemption rules for charitable organizations. Research on Chinese foundations documents both the promise and the friction of this model: tax-exempt status varies, and voluntary disclosure practices differ widely across foundations, shaping donor trust. The study notes that philanthropic culture in China is also inflected by what sociologist Fei Xiaotong famously described as a differential mode of association, in which giving flows preferentially along networks of kinship, locality and personal connection. Governance arrangements interact with this social texture, producing foundation-based endowment development that is expanding rapidly but unevenly.

Methodologically, the researchers coded legislative texts, policy documents and governance frameworks across the four jurisdictions, drawing on documentary and data sources assembled in comparative tables and an explicit analytical coding scheme. The authors are careful about what their design can and cannot claim. Because comparable longitudinal donation data are unavailable across the four systems, they frame their conclusions as institutional and configurational inference rather than causal proof that any single instrument increases donation volume. This evidence-bounded stance is a deliberate contribution to comparative higher education method, echoing broader debates about how qualitative comparative research can balance contextual sensitivity with comparability, and about policy assemblage and policy mobility in education studies.

The theoretical payoff lies in showing that endowment development is a governance outcome before it is a fundraising outcome. Drawing on the new institutionalism in political science, the authors treat rules, budgets and audit regimes as the substrate on which philanthropic markets either flourish or stall. Where Singapore, Hong Kong and China deploy configurations of legal authorization, matching grants, tax incentives, foundation governance and audit mechanisms, Taiwan’s single unified public finance framework provides recognition without separation. Donations exist, but they cannot easily be legally distinguished, accumulated across years, or strategically managed, which in turn weakens the incentives for universities to build professional advancement operations and for donors to commit large, long-horizon gifts.

From this comparison the study distills concrete policy implications for Taiwan, each framed cautiously. The authors suggest piloting legally distinguishable endowment vehicles that would allow donated funds to be separated from appropriated budgets without dismantling public financial oversight. They propose piloting matching grants, in the manner of Hong Kong’s schemes, while separately evaluating complementary tax incentives so that each instrument’s effects can be assessed on its own terms. They recommend selectively exploring differentiated financial governance, allowing leading universities more autonomy in managing donated assets under strengthened accountability. Finally, they emphasize transparency and communication, arguing that public trust in how donated money is held, invested and spent is itself a policy instrument that governments can sharpen.

The broader significance of the research extends beyond Taiwan. As governments worldwide push universities toward diversified revenue in an era of flat or declining public appropriations, the study warns that simply exhorting institutions to fundraise is unlikely to work if the underlying legal and financial architecture cannot accommodate endowments. Policy instrument configurations, the authors conclude, should be examined as institutional conditions for endowment-related governance, a lens that reframes university philanthropy not as a test of institutional charm but as a design problem in public finance. For East Asian higher education, where world-class ambitions increasingly collide with constrained state budgets, that reframing may prove one of the most consequential ideas in the debate over how universities pay for their futures.

Subject of Research: Comparative analysis of governance arrangements and policy instruments shaping university endowment development in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and China

Article Title: Governance arrangements and policy instruments in university endowment development: a comparative analysis of Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China

Article References: Lin, Y.-H., Chen, C.-C., Chen, K.-S., & Lin, J. (2026). Governance arrangements and policy instruments in university endowment development: a comparative analysis of Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01771-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01771-6

Keywords: university endowments, higher education governance, policy instruments, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, matching grants, tax incentives, university finance, foundation governance, comparative education