Indonesia's education system 'worst' in Asia: Survey
Indonesia's education system 'worst' in Asia: Survey
SINGAPORE (AFP): Indonesia has the worst education system in Asia, according to a new survey of foreign business executives working in 12 countries in the region.
Japan, Singapore and South Korea ranked the best, and as a result they have the highest quality labor forces, the Hong Kong- based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) said in announcing the finding on Sunday.
China and India were not high on the list, but because of their huge population, they have a large pool of highly-skilled labor army in niche industries, and had the potential to become formidable competitors in the future.
Educational standards in Southeast Asia rated poorly, particularly in Indonesia.
The survey included several criteria such as the overall impression of the quality of the local educational system, and the cost of production labor. It covered the availability of high quality production labor, the cost and availability of clerical and highly qualified management staff, proficiency in English and overall skill of the work force. (The accompanying table provides the average scores for each country).
"The first step to having a quality work force is developing a quality education system," the PERC report said. "This takes time and money, and some Asian countries have been much more successful than others at doing this."
It said Asia's most economically developed countries have invested heavily in education, and was one of the factors which have accounted for their success.
"Our survey indicates that expatriates today are even more impressed with how Korea has pushed its educational system to produce a quality labor force than they are with Japan," it said.
Lacking in natural resources, Asian "tiger" economies like Taiwan and Singapore have recognized that "labor was their main asset with which to attract foreign investment and stimulate economic development" and compete with new high-growth areas such as China and India.
PERC criticized Southeast Asian countries like the Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam for viewing China more as a competitor rather than a source of growth.
"Instead of trying to work through the challenge of how to use China and India's economic growth to their best advantage, most Southeast Asian countries are focusing on how to protect their domestic industries," PERC said.
It praised Singapore for responding to the challenges by further opening up its economy and bringing in more skilled expatriates to work for home-bred companies, despite some resentment among the local work force.
Such a policy, while it may be "painful to swallow politically", is more effective in the medium term in improving the competitiveness of the local labor force, PERC said.
The consultancy cautioned that the impact of the growing labor force in China and India will be "profound" to both Asia and the world.
"Both countries have almost unlimited pools of low cost production labor as well as huge numbers of engineers, scientists, computer programmers and other types of well- educated, skilled labor," it noted.
While India has been making a mark in using its top labor force to develop a world-class computer software industry, it can also move to harness its vast potentials to make it a manufacturing powerhouse like China.
China, on the other hand, "can take a page out of India's book and move more into knowledge industries" like computer programming and research.
These moves will bring the two "elephant economies" into competition with Asia's "tiger economies" in a wider range of industries, including manufacturing and services, PERC said.