Borrowing policies better versus borrowing better policies? Lessons from the histories of Korea and Japan

This paper was co-authored with Luis Crouch and published in the International Journal of Educational Development on November 16, 2024. It can be accessed at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738059324001883; ungated version available via email request.

In this paper, we focus on two educational development paragons: Korea and Japan. We also present a framework for understanding policy borrowing. We then compare Korean and Japanese education policy borrowing strategies against our framework. We also contrast how this was done to the now-current policy lending approaches of two multilateral agencies, UNESCO and the World Bank, and two relatively new (at least in education) bilateral agencies, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Korea International Cooperation Agency. We conclude that the process of policy lending and borrowing today is, in many respects, much less productive than was historically the case when Korea and Japan borrowed so well, and that policy lending agencies and borrowing countries could learn a great deal from how Japan and Korea did it. We show that one likely reason Korea and Japan borrowed so well was the intensity with which they analyzed and then implemented or rejected what they saw, was that they saw education as perhaps the single most important factor in their development as nations. In our examination of educational development today, we argue, that centrality is largely missing, which may explain why policy borrowing processes comparatively weak.