ABSTRACT
As difficult as it may be for some of us to admit, economists do not always get things right. Fabella (2012) gives an example of this less-than-perfect record – the prognosis in the late 1950s regarding which Asian countries were most likely to succeed:
Burma… was one of the countries (the Philippines was another!) predicted by Nobel Memorial prize co-winner Gunnar Myrdal, author of the ambitious three-volume opus The Asian Drama, to inherit the mantle of rapid growth in the Asian region. South Korea, in contrast, failed to make Myrdal’s list.
This widely shared, but inaccurate, prediction was fuelled partly by the head-start that Burma (now Myanmar) and the Philippines had in the human capital they had accumulated relative to other countries. In 1960, the secondary school enrolment rate in the Philippines was 26 per cent – higher than that of Malaysia and Hong Kong and, indeed, higher than that of Portugal and Spain! 2 Poorer Burma’s secondary school enrolment rate was much lower at 10 per cent, but still-higher than rates then in Indonesia and Thailand, both of which are now significantly richer.