Economic and legal aspects of higher education quality and accordance assurance: comparative analysis of Latvia within European Higher Education Area

The role of higher education and its various related organizational, administrative, managerial, format-wise and content-wise aspects is being increasing challenged by both, labour market / business environment and by changing trends in public governance. Therefore, also the very administrative procedures envisaged to ensure higher quality and accordance to the needs of labour markets, business environment and society in general are being challenged in many countries and are subjected to significant change. This chain of effects are very much related to global technological and societal governance development, that changes social norms and skills needed for competitive welfare life. The article will analyse the changes in higher education quality and accordance (to the labour market) assurance breaking it down to major dimensions – quality assurance procedures, which is part of the legal aspects, and higher education supply formats and contents, which shall be analysed from economics point of view. This will largely include also the analyses of the higher education demand side, which is heavily affected by the mentioned global technological and societal governance shifts. The major aim of the article is to identify the best practices that allows to keep optimal balance between ensuring the quality of science / higher education itself and its accordance and the new role to the labour market / business environment and higher education demand side. The major research method is the comparative analysis of Latvia case study within European Higher Education Area. Keywords: Higher education quality management, Higher education accreditation.