Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific

Abstract

Since 1960, economies in the East Asia and Pacific region have had both faster economic growth and greater human capital accumulation than any other. They have made large investments in improving the amount and quality of schooling to promote rapid and continual economic progress. For a handful of the region’s economies, success raised both the supply of and demand for skilled labor and transformed many into prosperous and inclusive middle-income societies. Too many countries in the region, however, have fallen short of their economic aspirations and have failed to take advantage of education’s promise. Both groups are eager to learn how they can do better. Understanding the elements of success is a critically important policy priority. Countries wanting to learn to fuel economic growth ask themselves, What policies and practices help to promote superior learning outcomes? And, what can governments do to consistently and equitably raise aggregate learning in their national school systems? Growing smarter: learning and equitable development in East Asia and Pacific provides answers to these questions. The developing world is during a global learning crisis: in an unacceptably high number of countries, schooling is not leading to learning. The World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise focuses attention on the typical education system in the developing world, where inequalities in learning outcomes are wide and improvements in system wide learning are often slow. These two reports complement each other, with the present report centering on policies and practices that have led national education systems in East Asia and Pacific to produce graduates with consistently high learning outcomes, and to do so equitably. Education holds promise for macroeconomic growth and for individuals’ opportunities, especially among the bottom 40 percent of income earners. Knowledge of successful policies and practices is vitally important for the World Bank’s Twin Goals of inclusive growth and poverty reduction. Growing Smarter: Learning and Equitable Development in East Asia and Pacific focuses on the lessons that have allowed the region’s economies not only to avoid learning crises but also to build and maintain high-performing education systems.