Quality national education programs are critical to building competitive offshore locations.  The leading comparative national education survey is the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).  The latest data was collected in 2006 and covers 57 locations.  Together, all the countries in the program account for 90% of global economic output.

The survey focuses on 15 year olds and measures student performance across three key areas: literacy; mathematics; and science.  In addition, the assessment collects data on learning strategies of students and their problem-solving skills.  Figure 1 bellow illustrates the average scores for key offshore outsourcing locations.

Educational Achievement in Leading Outsourcing Locations - Figure 1

Source: OECD PISA (2006)

The two largest gaps, from an offshore outsourcing perspective, are India and China.  India does not participate in the survey and China participates in a limited fashion.  Chinese data is collected in Hong Kong and Macao which is not representative of the resource pool for most outsourcing operations.

Achievement is led by Canada, but closely followed by a number of Eastern European countries.  The Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary all score well and are followed by Russia.  Israel captures the 6th spot and is followed by the top Latin American country in the group, Chile.

The middle ranks are a mixture of Asian and European countries.  At the bottom are two of the large Latin American countries, Argentina and Brazil.

Note, the score for the United States does not include numbers for literacy due to a problem during the data collection phase.