The Singapore Commentator

Charlene Huang, an undergraduate thesis student of Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, doesn’t have flattering things to say about Britain’s colonial legacy in Singapore as far as education is concerned.

An excerpt from her draft:

A comparison of primary enrollment ratios in 1960 and the Barro-Lee data on the stock of human capital in 1960 clearly illustrates [that] although Singapore and Korea both have about 100% primary enrollment in 1960, the percentage of the adults over 25 years of age in 1960 who completed primary school was 26.2% for Korea, but only 5.6% for Singapore. It seems that Singapore’s British colonizers were not as interested in educating the masses, as was Lee Kuan Yew’s government.

They did leave behind a nice port, though.