ISAS Insights

In 2005, the World Bank published a report on India and the knowledge economy.1 The thrust of the World Bank report was on education’s role as a fundamental enabler of the knowledge economy and the knowledge economy’s requirement of a new set of skills and competencies. In a simple sense, a country’s per capita national income is nothing but a measure of the average productivity of its citizens.2 With ageing populations in developed countries, and even in countries like Russia and China, there has been talk of India’s demographic dividend.3 That the demographic dividend argument works, is known. For East Asia, several studies suggest that between 25 to 40 percent of the East Asian miracle was due to the demographic dividend.4 Other than East Asia, it has worked in Japan in the 1950s, China in the 1980s and Ireland in the 1980s and the 1990s.