Vietnam’s extraordinary performance in the PISA assessment: A cultural explanation of an education paradox

M Asadullah, Liyanage Devangi H. Perera and Saizi Xiao

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2020, vol. 42, issue 5, 913-932

Abstract: This paper examines the nature and drivers of Vietnam’s paradoxical performance in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) – consistently high student achievement despite being the poorest of all participating countries and a centralized education system. We first document ‘Vietnam advantage’ in a wide-range of supply and demand-related indicators such as school participation rate, educational inequality, inputs and expenditure in cross-country regression models. We then estimate an augmented educational production function to show that these supply and demand-side advantages don’t explain away Vietnam’s positive deviance in PISA when compared to other participating developing and developed countries. We then conduct student-level analysis to examine Vietnam’s performance in PISA 2012 in a regional context, vis-à-vis three high-spending but low-performing ASEAN member countries (Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand) and two high performing Asian countries (South Korea and Singapore). Pooled regression estimates show that, holding differences in various indices of socioeconomic background, the gap in average student test scores between Vietnam and South Korea in Reading and Science becomes statistically insignificant. Moreover, once school-specific differences are also accounted for, Vietnamese students do just as well as Singaporean across all subjects – equalizing for existing socioeconomic differences between countries would give Vietnam an even better advantage in PISA. A similar gain in PISA scores is absent in the case of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. The paper concludes by offering a cultural explanation for the significant variation in educational performance among high-spending East Asian countries.

Keywords: ASEAN; Confucian culture; Expenditure policy; Educational productivity; Malaysia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A20 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893820300326
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Vietnam's Extraordinary Performance in the PISA Assessment: A Cultural Explanation of an Education Paradox (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:42:y:2020:i:5:p:913-932

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2020.02.007

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Policy Modeling is currently edited by A. M. Costa

More articles in Journal of Policy Modeling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().