Excerpts from website description:

The workshop on "Funding and financing early childhood services" was hosted by the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. The discussion paper, Financing ECEC services in OECD countries, was written by Professors Gordon Cleveland and Mike Krashinsky of the University of Toronto, Canada. The paper makes the case for public investment in ECEC ­ in other words, the benefits and costs of public investment in early childhood services; provides an analytical classification of the main funding mechanisms used in different OECD countries for funding ECEC services for children of different ages (0-3, 3-6), together with a tabulation of information available on these funding mechanisms; reviews the research findings about the advantages and disadvantages of different funding mechanisms and methods of providing ECEC services; examines the evidence about the comparative costs of different types (and quality levels) of services in OECD countries.