Author: Mark Hanson

Economic Development, Education and Transnational Corporations (New York: Routledge Press, 2007)  http://www.routledge.com or www.Amazon.com

This book focuses on the questions of:  why do some economically disadvantaged nations develop significantly faster than others, and what roles do their educational systems play?

As case illustrations, in the early 1960s Mexico and South Korea were primarily agrarian societies and both equally underdeveloped. The development strategies pursued by each country resulted in dramatically different results.  By the turn of the century South Korea possessed one of the finest educational systems in the world and was a world-class producer of high-tech products. Mexico, on the other hand, was still graduating less than half of its secondary school-age students and bogged down in assembling products owned by others.

Professor Hanson situates the issue in the manner and intensity in which these countries employed their educational, governmental and business institutions to acquire manufacturing knowledge from transnational corporations, and how they used these insights to grow their own local industries. Whereas South Korea looked at the foreign plants as if they were educational systems and pursued with tenacity the new knowledge they reduced unemployment. The author argues that significant economic growth and improvements in education will only occur when socio-political barriers are broken down by the human resource needs of industrialization. This is one of the first books of its kind to compare South East Asian and Latin American economies and their links to educational systems.

Mark Hanson is a Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Education and Management at the University of California, Riverside.
 e-mail: mark.hanson@ucr.edu