ABSTRACT
EDUCATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT How East Asia was able to do much better than everyone else, and most spectacularly, accelerate its growth during the “lost decade” (as seen from Africa and Latin America) of the 1980s, has been the subject of voluminous discussion, in which education has featured prominently. We begin by comparing some measurable features of education with similar data for other regions of the world. When this is done, East Asia looks surprisingly ordinary in some respects, but extraordinary in others.
