Word: brazile
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...program to teach reading, arithmetic and elementary science in 2005 after officials noticed an unusually high number of accidents occurring on the shop floor because laborers could not read warning signs. More than just the workers' safety and Petrobras' productivity is at stake. The woeful state of education in Brazil, the world's fifth largest country, is compromising productivity and competitiveness and acting as a brake on the country's development, according to economists, businesspeople and educators. With the economies of China and India surging ahead, thanks in part to their large pools of educated workers, the issue has become...
...India and the Asian tigers are places that have educated populations, and that has been the basis for their economic explosions," says Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard who studies the relationship between education and national prosperity. India and China may have illiteracy rates that are higher than Brazil's, but they also have much larger populations of educated, skilled workers. "Brazil's poor economic growth over the past few years is associated in part with the low level of education," Glaeser says...
Certainly, something has held Brazil back. Brazil grew an average of 2.6% from 2000 to 2005--less than half the rate of Russia, South Korea and India and less than a third that of China. Such disparities have convinced many Brazilian business leaders that if their government does not invest in education, then they must assume the responsibility themselves. By offering lessons in everything from basic literacy to aeronautics, "companies are taking on the role of the state," says Fernando Guimarães, director of SESI, an industrial organization that coordinates adult-education programs at big companies...
That education takes many forms. At Embraer, the world's fourth largest commercial aircraft manufacturer and the pride of Brazil's export industry, directors realized that the company faced a shortage of aerospace engineers because the advanced training they needed wasn't available in Brazil. In 2000 the company set up an 18-month-long postgraduate course to train its engineers in aerodynamics and flight mechanics. So far, nearly 800 people have taken the course. "We create from inside, and we are now delivering engineers with a specialist aerospace background," says Peter Clignett, a Dutch lecturer in Embraer's program...
Having access to technology and workers with the skills to use it determine a country's total factor productivity and, in the end, its wealth. In 1960 South Korea and Brazil had about the same per capita income. Today South Korea's per capita income is five times Brazil's. "Most of the growth in Korea in this period can be attributed to improvements in total factor productivity," Rodriguez says. "And that is what Brazil needs...