Abstract
Education is likely to play an increasingly important role in Southeast Asia over the next few decades. The reason is that past development strategies in the region have primarily relied on exports of labor-intensive and low-skilled products, but there now seems to be a need to upgrade production and exports. Even in the more high-skilled industries, such as electronics, the part of the production process located in Southeast Asia is often simple assembly. One illustrative example is found in the hard disk drive (HDD) industry. In 1995 all major foreign firms in the industry had assembly plants in Southeast Asia and the region accounted for as much as 64 percent of final global assembly and 44 percent of total global employment (Amsden et al. 2001:3). Still, the region only received 13 percent of the industry’s wages because high-skilled activities are maintained in Europe, Japan and the US, and low-skilled activities are located in Southeast Asia.