Globalization, democratization and government education provision in East Asia

How would globalization and democratization affect government education provision in East Asia? My dissertation conducts the first systematic statistical and comparative case study in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong (before 1997), Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. The statistical study covers all eight cases for the time period 1971 to 2003. It finds no robust effects of trade and capital account openness on government education provision, evaluated from resources, participation, attainment, and gender equity. However, comparative case studies of Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand show significant effects of globalization. As governments in these cases adopted an outward-oriented economic strategy, increasing competition from the global market eventually pressured them to adapt their education systems to the needs of the economy and the global market. Common reform measures include expanding education access, updating vocational, science and technology education, administrative reforms and learning reforms. The role of the state is critical in this process of education upgrading. The states that prioritize the importance of human capital in their development model early and have efficient policy linkages matching economic demand and education supply did better. The case studies also show that the globalization indicators used in the statistical study cannot capture its impacts well. Democratization has been found to have positive effects on government education provision in both the statistical and the case studies. The statistical study finds that comparing with their authoritarian counterparts, democracies in East Asia have a higher per capita education spending, a higher per student spending as percent of GDP per capita at the primary and the secondary levels and a higher gross secondary school enrollment. Consistently, the case studies show that democratization is associated with expanding education access, redistributing education resources from the elites to the masses and fundamental education reforms. However, the mechanisms producing these changes vary by case. The civil society played a major role in initiating changes in Taiwan whereas electoral competition had limited effects. In Thailand, the main architects of reform were educational and bureaucratic elites in the 1970s and might be the civil society and democratic elites in the recent democratic period.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 537-566)