Technology Development via Human Resources Exploitation: Evidence from Southeast Asian Countries

The purpose of this article is to summarize and integrate the articles appearing in this special issue within the unique technology development (TD) and human resources (HR) of Southeast Asian countries. This paper examines how the synergy between TD and HR can lead to improved national economic performance. We proposed that better HR ex-ploitation can sustain the capabilities of TD. Thus, the detail indexes are first evaluated with each category, which con-structs the basic meanings of TD and HR. Consequently, the contexts of TD are clustered by different patterns with similar attributes in each nation. Each pattern can monitor the performance of HR in specific TD pattern. In this em-pirical study, we discover that the leading three countries (Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand) have a strong positive rank correlation between TD and HR; In contrast, the rest of countries are poor rank correlation with regard to the two categories. These results mention that the level of TD, which depends on HR exploitation, is an important indicator of technological capability and even a proof of economic growth. We also examine the TD policies with strategic grid and offer a better road path of TD to follow, not only for those type countries to retune their policy, but also to parallel de-velopment in HR areas—such as the level of education upgrading, labor force environment improving, man power util-izing. Finally, Southeast Asian countries should calibrate feasible HR when use it to elaborate TD