Future prospects of human capital development can be seen from the current trends in education among the children as well as the training efforts made in enterprises. Table II.7 shows net primary school enrolment ratios, among primary schoolaged children in developing countries. It indicates that primary school enrolment in developing countries, on average, is well behind that of developed countries. This appears to be due to a few developing regions that show extremely poor performance, such as Central Asia and SSA. On the other hand, both the LAC and EAP regions show an impressive performance that is comparable to the developed countries. This regional disparity poses a big challenge to the less performing developing regions with a high number of undereducated children lowering the average level of human capital among the working-age population.
To see how developing countries are doing to foster a higher skilled workforce, Table II.8 examines entry rates in post-basic schooling (i.e. upper-secondary and tertiary) for selected developing countries. Similar to the trends found in educational attainment in basic schooling (Table II.6), Table II.8 indicates that both the LAC and SEAsia regions have high average enrolment rates of 74 and 67 per cent (upper-secondary)
and 31 and 25 per cent (tertiary), respectively. Intraregional disparities in entry rates remain large, with low-performing countries such as Paraguay and Indonesia lagging behind high-performing countries such as Argentina and Malaysia.
While numerous sources of cross-country data on formal education exist, crosscountry evidence on vocational training within the enterprises is rather limited9. A rare example is the World Bank’s World Business Environment Survey, which covers vast regions of the world including OECD countries, Latin America, and East Asia. The survey shows that approximately 60 per cent of firms in both the East Asian and Latin American regions conducted some formal training in the year 2000 (Batra and Tan, 2002; Batra, 2003). There are, however, large intraregional disparities in training. In the East Asian region, large training incidences exist between high training countries such as Singapore (76 per cent), Philippines (76 per cent), China (65 per cent) and low training countries such as Indonesia (46 per cent) and Malaysia (29 per cent).
Summary To sum up, trends show that educational attainment among the adult population has steadily increased over the past three decades. However, cross-regional and intraregional disparities remain a disturbing issue with the African region consistently lagging behind other developing regions. Future prospects of educational attainment among the adult population are bright for countries in some areas of the developing world including LAC and SE-Asia. However, the present state of school participation in the African region shows limited prospects for future growth in human capital. Evidence on enterprise training is fairly consistent with these trends in formal education with large cross-country disparities.
OECD DEVELOPMENT CENTRE Working Paper No. 211 HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES by Koji Miyamoto
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