I want to believe your statement, but could you share some references for it?
I mean, some clue that education has been the driving force in the growth of east asian countries, rather than internal/external factors of other kinds.
I mean, some clue that education has been the driving force in the growth of east asian countries, rather than internal/external factors of other kinds.
I was more looking to something like books, articles, researches that would explain how _investments in education_ in eastern countries have been the most effective on growth, rather than everything else.
Or the opposite, say, the last 20 years of low growth in japan are due to disinvestments in education.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=singapore+gdp+growth+ra...
I'll quote a few relevant snippets from the article, for anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing.
Challenging the conventional view, there is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. Comparisons between countries also confound the idea that more education translates into more growth. For example, South Korea is often given as an example of a country that made education a priority since the 1960s and saw significant economic growth. But as Professor Alison Wolf from King's College London points out, Egypt has also prioritised investing in education, but its growth record has been poor (4). Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt's primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled - yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world's forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth.
A retort might be that education isn't the sole determinant of growth - other factors may offset its positive economic role - but it remains a necessary one. But this argument doesn't stand up either. The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn't accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.
A study for the World Bank came to similar conclusions. In a paper called 'Where has all the education gone?', public policy academic Lant Pritchett couldn't find the positive correlation between education and productivity that underpins so much current international development thinking (5). Economist William Easterly summarised the study:
'African countries with rapid growth in human capital [the fashionable term for people's work abilities, especially levels of education] over the 1960 to 1987 period - countries like Angola, Mozambique, Ghana, Zambia, Madagascar, Sudan, and Senegal - were nevertheless growth disasters. Countries like Japan, with modest growth in human capital, were growth miracles. Other East Asian miracles like Singapore, Korea, China, and Indonesia did have rapid growth in human capital, but equal to or less than that of the African growth disasters. To take one comparison, Zambia had slightly faster expansion in human capital than Korea, but Zambia's growth rate was seven percentage points lower.
PS: There is plenty of talk about the value of rich people investing in the next waves of technology. However, Moving into the realm of 8+ figure incomes only a tiny fraction of that spending ends up on the type of mass producible goods that lead to economic growth, instead buying things like gardens or Yachts that quickly lose value.
China's slow rise to power from 1949 to 1979 wasn't because of corruption, but incompetence and policies, practices & ideology that was incompatible with economic growth, positive reform & capitalism. The anti-capitalist purges in the early 1950s lead to a wave of Shanghaiese & others moving to Hong Kong, to help boost its economy. There were some positive reforms in China to help boost economic growth and living standards, but those are overshadowed by the massively incompetent programs that destroyed the economy and country for thirty years, this after decades of war and civil war.
If anything, the level of corruption has massive increased since the reform period began in 1979. Though that may be the type of corruption has changed, from food, job, marriage, life, location & housing to money as the prime difference in the types of corruption being most prevalent.