The oil-rich countries of the Gulf are investing heavily in education to
diversify their economies and build a workforce capable of competing in
knowledge-intensive industries.
But a paper by the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released on Monday has some bad news
for them. Students in resource-rich economies nearly always underperform compared with their
peers in countries where people have to study and work hard for a
living.
The OECD reached its conclusion after surveying the educational
performance of students across 65 countries globally, measuring them with a
standardized test called the Program for International Student Assessment
(PISA). Looking at the Middle East, the paper compared PISA scores from 2009 by
resource-poor Israel with the energy exporters Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and the
United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“As the Bible notes, Moses arduously led the
Jews for 40 years through the desert – just to bring them to the only country in
the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all,”
Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education policy to the OECD
secretary-general and head of its Indicators and Analysis Division, said in an
online comment.
Israel, which derives a tiny fraction of its gross
domestic product from natural resources, scored a national average of 447 points
on the mathematics PISA, the highest in the Middle East. By comparison, Saudi
Arabia, which gets close to half its national income from energy extraction,
scored close to the bottom of the 65 countries surveyed with an average of
336. Other energy exporters scored little better.
“One interpretation is that in
countries with little in the way of natural resources -- other examples [besides
Israel] are Finland, Singapore or Japan -- education has strong outcomes and a
high status at least in part because the public at large has understood that the
country must live by its knowledge and skills,” Schleicher said.
The Gulf
oil exporters are wealthy, but they suffer from high unemployment and a lack of
opportunities to start businesses or make careers in challenging, well-paid
jobs. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the jobless rate is in the double digits,
with unemployment for people aged 20-24 estimated at four times the national average,
even as the economy has been growing quickly, boosted by high oil prices. That
has prompted the country to beef up its educational system, investing in
multi-billion-dollar university campuses and luring world class researchers to
shake up a primary school system focused on religious studies. Saudi Arabia’s
$2.4 billion Tatweer education project, backed by King Abdullah, aims to form
partnerships with international companies to develop an education industry,
curricula, teacher training and technology intended to create so-called smart
schools.
In fact, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) says the Arab world is one of the biggest spenders on
educational globally. It estimates that the region is spending 4.89% of GDP on
schooling, ahead of any other region of the world except North America and
Western Europe. Resource-rich economies are widely acknowledged to be
economically and socially less developed because their exports of oil and other
mineral wealth undermine other industries. But Schleicher adds lazy students to
the list of woes that easy income creates. Among oil exporters at the bottom of
the class are Iran with a PISA score of 397, Kuwait 358 and Qatar 368. Only the
UAE, at 421, breaks the 400 barrier.
“Many of the countries with
below-average GDP succeeded to convert their national resources into physical
capital and consumption today, but failed to convert these into the human
capital that can generate the economic and social outcomes to sustain their
future,” he writes.
Muhammad Faour, a senior associate the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East Center, said in a recent
interview that most education systems in the Arab world have failed to prepare
students to compete in the global economy. But he blamed the suppliers (the
schools) rather than the consumers (the students).
“Teaching in most Arab
states continues to be highly didactic, teacher-directed, and not conducive to
fostering analytical free thinking,” he said in a Q&A published in December.
“On top of that, Arab countries have a shortage of qualified teachers and most
of those currently employed have relatively low salaries and limited
opportunities for professional development.”
By contrast, Israel has
spawned a world-class high technology sector and all seven of its universities
ranked among the world’s top 500 in last year’s Academic Ranking of World
Universities. But Israel’s laurels are wilted; its PISA scores lead the Middle
East but are about average for the 65 countries surveyed by the OECD. It also
faces the bittersweet prospect of easy, energy-generated wealth after the
discovering of huge natural gas reserves off its Mediterranean coast.
In
Israel’s favor, the government plans to divert much of its energy income into a
sovereign wealth fund. Under a plan approved in principle by the cabinet in
February, half of the state’s royalties from gas and oil will be deposited into a
fund that will invest in foreign securities and spend profits in education and
defense.
That kind of strategy, the OECD’s Schleicher said, is the key to
enjoying natural resource wealth and ensuring the nation’s children do not
coast through school. He noted in his paper that the few economies, among them
Canada, Australia and Norway, where student performance and reliance on natural
resources are both high, governments have deliberate policies of saving rather
than spending the wealth.