The world’s most promising countries were basket cases a few years ago

If you think that most developing nations are hopeless — or, as President Trump reportedly said, that some of them are “shithole countries” — you should take a look at the World Bank’s new ranking of the world’s most promising nations: Most of them were basket cases not so long ago.

The World Bank’s Human Capital Index, released on Thursday, measures 157 countries according to their children’s knowledge, skills and health.

Its underlying rationale is that — in a world economy that relies more and more on mental work and increasingly less on manual labour — young people’s health and education standards will be the keys to economic progress. As robots and artificial intelligence take over growing numbers of low-skilled jobs, there will be a growing need for well-educated workers who can do more sophisticated work.

Singapore is the No. 1 country in the new index, followed by South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Finland and Ireland. Among those further down the list are Sweden (8), Germany (11), the United Kingdom (15), Israel (23), the United States (24), Russia (34), Chile (35) and China (46).

Most Latin American countries are in the middle tier. Costa Rica ranks 57th, followed by Argentina (63), Mexico (64), Ecuador (66), Uruguay (68), Colombia (70), Peru (72), and Brazil (81).

But what’s really interesting about this and similar rankings by other international institutions is the speed with which some formerly poor and corruption-ridden nations can become success stories.

Singapore was such a disastrous colony that Great Britain, in effect, abandoned it in 1963, and Malaysia took it over. But soon, the Malaysians left, too, and Singapore became independent in 1965.

At the time of Singapore’s independence, its per capita income was similar to that of Mexico. Today, Singapore’s per capita income is higher than that of the United States, and four times higher than Mexico’s.

Singapore’s secret was that, in part because it didn’t have natural resources, it decided to invest heavily in its people’s education. Like South Korea and Japan, it has a national obsession with education.

When I visited Singapore a few years ago, one of the things that most struck me were the $2 bills. Instead of having the image of their independence heroes, they have the image of a university and a professor giving a lecture to his students. Underneath that image appears, in capital letters, the word “Education.”

In some of these top ranked countries, only students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class can apply to become teachers. And once they do, they are often paid according to their performance in the classroom and enjoy a relatively high social status.