Because of the focus on basic education, in East Asia public funds for schooling are more likely to benefit low-income children who otherwise might not stay in school. By giving priority to expanding the primary and secondary bases of the educational pyramid, East Asian governments have stimulated the demand for higher education while relying to a large extent on the private sector to satisfy that demand. In one such test of performance conducted in 20 diverse countries, Japanese students ranked first, and students from Hong Kong were in the top half of the distribution. Vocational training Human resources and the training to upgrade them have been important to the HPAEs' successful export drives, despite the high labor intensity of their manufactured exports. But vocational training is rarely cost-efficient when provided in the school systems.
Firms prefer to do their own training, partly because many skills are firm-specific.
Some government efforts to promote training have gone awry. But Singapore succeeded by using training to promote the information technology sector. Singapore has achieved world leadership in information- related services through a concerted program that involved technical education institutions, training subsidies to schools and office workers, computerization of the civil service, and establishment of TradeNet, a global information network.