Powered by education, East Asia is getting ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Recent trends in automation and rapid technology advances, collectively dubbed ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution (“4IR”), are radically shifting the economic landscape, and changing the nature of jobs and the profile of skills required in the labor force.  There are challenges emerging around the world and East Asia is getting ready…

International Tests in Reading Put East Asian and European Students On Top The latest results of the international assessment of reading for fourth graders was released. This time 50 countries participated in PIRLS 2016. Top performers were Russia and Singapore. High performers also included Hong Kong SAR, Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland, England, Chinese Taipei, Norway and Latvia. Since 2001, big improvements in reading have been recorded by students in Russia: 53 points—just over a half a standard deviation, or something like two grade levels; Singapore, 48; Hong Kong SAR, 41; and Slovenia 40…

Samsung Creativity Lab–And What it Means for Education Digital City is a gleaming corporate utopia in Suwon-si, an hour south of Seoul. One floor under Central Park is an underground crossroads that connects high rise buildings (and protects workers from Korea’s hot summers and cold winters) and is the epicenter of Samsung’s commitment to innovation. Jay Lee leads the Creativity & Innovation Lab, C-Lab for short, a corporate incubator launched in 2012 with the goal of being “Creative igniters for the future.” Open to any Samsung employee, C-lab is temporary home to about 100 staffers working on new projects. They get a two year runway, some investment and technical assistance. The incubator has spun up 180 business ideas in 16 categories (below) from 750 participants…

Future jobseekers may need to impress robots  Belong, a Bengalaru-based recruitment start-up, is part of a new group of companies which use technology to simplify the hiring process, from sorting resumes to scheduling interviews. The company has developed a platform that goes even further than that, scouring the internet to unearth publicly available information on all possible candidates. It scans their Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, and more…

Double For Nothing? Experimental Evidence On An Unconditional Teacher Salary Increase In Indonesia (and http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Working%20Papers/Double%20for%20Nothing%20(Current%20WP).pdf)  How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector? We present experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teacher base salaries. Using a large-scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of Indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools, we find that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers’ satisfaction with their income, reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs, and reduced self-reported financial stress. Nevertheless, after two and three years, the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes. The effects are precisely estimated, and we can rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores. Our results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public-sector settings…

A.I. Will Transform the Economy. But How Much, and How Soon? There are basically three big questions about artificial intelligence and its impact on the economy: What can it do? Where is it headed? And how fast will it spread? Three new reports combine to suggest these answers: It can probably do less right now than you think. But it will eventually do more than you probably think, in more places than you probably think, and will probably evolve faster than powerful technologies have in the past…

Australian Aid’s innovative approach to education in Indonesia  Although the Indonesian government has increased spending on primary education and the country boasts a national primary enrollment rate nearing 100 percent, Indonesia’s children are still lagging behind regional and global counterparts in literacy and numeracy…