Misum Affiliated Researcher and Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Abhijeet Singh was featured in The Economist’s June 29 article “Why are Vietnam’s schools so good? It understands the value of education and manages its teachers well”. The feature draws on Abhijeet’s 2020 publication “Learning More with Every Year: School year productivity and international learning divergence”, alongside research from the Centre for Global Development, the Asian Development Bank, and the Mekong Development Research Institute in addressing Vietnamese educational outcomes. 

The article reads, “in a study in 2020, Abhijeet Singh of the Stockholm School of Economics gauged the greater productivity of Vietnam’s schools by examining data from identical tests taken by students in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. He showed that between the ages of five and eight Vietnamese children race ahead. One more year of education in Vietnam increases the probability that a child can solve a simple multiplication problem by 21 percentage points; in India the uplift is six points.” 

The article suggests that “the biggest reason [for Vietnam’s exceptional school-year productivity ] is the calibre of its teachers. Not that they are necessarily better qualified; they are simply more effective at teaching.” This is one component of what Abhijeet refers to as system-level productivity of a country’s education system, which is demonstrated to contribute to variations in the quality of human capital resulting from a school year.  

Read the full research paper here. 

Read the full article from The Economist here. 

Learn more about Misum’s Human Capital and Sustainable Development research platform here. 

If you missed it, Misum Postdoc Fellow Marion Leroutier was also featured in The Economist in early June for her work on carbon pricing and power sector decarbonization.