About the Book

In the early 1960s, Mexico and South Korea were agrarian societies and both equally undeveloped. The development strategies used by each country resulted in dramatically different results. Mark Hanson's incisive new monograph concentrates on comparing and contrasting these countries and answering the wider question of why some Third World nations have developed economically and educationally faster than others.

Hanson situates the issue in the manner and intensity in which these countries employed their educational, governmental and business institutions to acquire manufacturing knowledge from transnational corporations and how they used this to grow their own local industries. Whereas South Korea looked to foreign plants as educational systems and pursued with tenacity the new knowledge they possessed, Mexico viewed them as 'cash cows' that generated wages and reduced unemployment. Hanson argues that significant economic growth and improvements in education will only occur when driven by the needs of industrialization.This is one of the first books of its kind to compare South East Asian and Latin American economies.