Knowledge Society part 7
In the knowledge society, people with knowledge are key factors for innovations, main drivers of economic growth, and major determinants of competitiveness in global trades. Today countries can not depend solely on natural resources as main exports for economic prosperity but must increasingly focus on the combinations of technical innovations and application of knowledge. Let us look at Japan since the Meiji Restoration in 1863. After being humiliated by foreigners and forcing to open the country for trades, Japan immediately refocuses its effort on education, especially on scientific and technological research. It should come as no surprise that today the richest and most developed country in Asia is Japan. After World War 2, Korea's economy was devastated and had the same economy index as countries of Africa such as Ghana, Mozambique and Angola. By investing in education, today S. Korea is the second most developed country in Asia, only half point below Japan. Similar situations can be found in Singapore and Taiwan, both focusing on improving education, and both become strong economic powers.
A key factor in the education improvement is the emerging of the private university. The list of top university in the world consists of mostly private university. Eight out of ten top universities in the U.S are all private. Countries such as India, Brazil, and Argentina failed to gain significant returns on their investment in education because their education were “locked in” the state universities, with academy hierarchy that has no incentive for change. In the knowledge economy, private universities have more money, knowledge and personnel for technological innovation because they have different motivation. Among developed nations the share of the private university in the national research and development activities is 50-60 percent, both in terms of financing and carrying out when state university typically undertaking less than 15-20 percent of the activities. With better finance by the industry, better research laboratories, private universities attract better professors, better students and be able to create more successful researches with significant results. The collaboration between industries and private university is one of the key factors in the knowledge society. In the period 1995-2000, capital invested in private research increased from $ 5 billion to $ 105 billion is the USA; from $ 19 million to $ 3 billion in the UK; from $ 21 million to $ 2 billion in Japan; from $ 13 million to 2 billion in Germany; from $ 8 million to $ 1.5 billion in France. All of these researches have resulted in trillion dollars in High tech business and these products have started to account for a rapidly increasing portion of global trade. The proportion of manufactured products with high-technology content (Computer, Phones, TV, and Electronics etc.) in international trade has gone from 30 percent in 1976 to 84 percent in 2000. The total volume of high-tech products exports of the leading countries in this area was $ 1097 billion. The USA, Japan, Germany and UK accounted for 82 percent of this market.
Based on these data, I believe that the key feature of the knowledge economy is the existence of an education system with research and development that enables a country to be a significant recipient of income from high tech products as well as royalty and license fees. By having capability in high technology, a country can be a key player in global trade. Although there are several definitions for knowledge society, but based on the above data, I think we can define knowledge society as a nation populated by the highly educated workforce, driven by a knowledge-economy, based on knowledge creation and inventions.
So why would a country want to become a knowledge society? With globalization, competition among nations will become fierce and without knowledge and skills to keep up, some countries will be left behind. With technology advancement, some countries will take advantage of the others by dumping toxic wastes and open highly polluted manufactures in others, thus destroy their lands. Without foods and clean water, they can not survive. Some developed countries will get richer and many developing countries could become poorer and may be not able to catch up. Data from the United Nation already proved that there is over 400-fold difference between the per capita GDP of Switzerland and Mozambique. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of HarvardUniversity has talked about a future world divided along the lines of technological “Have” and “Have not”. He praises the impressive advance of science and technology, but also warns about a widening gap based on technology between nations. According to his calculation, only sixth of the world's population control nearly all of the world's technological innovations, selling goods and products to about half of the world population who can consume these technologies. The remaining of the world's population is classified as “technologically disconnected” and will be excluded. With advance in computing, telecommunication, and biotechnology, some nations could control most of the world because they have the mean as well as the basic human needs such as foods, and clean water.
Dr Sachs predicts that the next world war will not be a war based on weapons but on foods since all developed countries already have weapon of mass destruction and do not want to get to total destruction so they will wage war on foods and water. To avoid this, Dr Sachs calls on financial and technological assistance from the developed countries to the developing nations to help them cross the technological gap. Many statistics already prove his point because technological capacity is indeed concentrated in the hands of the few. Understand this fact, recently a number of countries, through judicious investments in education and creative policies, have crossed into the league of the technical elites, among them are Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, and Mexico.
More than ever, I believe that investment in education is important. Nobody said it is easy but we need to do that for our next generation. We must put our efforts to create the best education system with research and development. We need to invest more in technology to have a strong educated workforce to build our economy and keep up with the global trends. If we have overcome many obstacles in the past, I do not see any reason to stop now.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
