The Development of East Asian Countries towards a Knowledge-based Economy: A DEA Analysis

This paper measures the knowledge-based development of nine countries in the two categories of developed and emerging economies. The developed economies selected include the three bench-marking developed countries from three different regions; they are the United States from the North American region, Finland from Europe and Japan, Korea and Singapore from the Asia region. The emerging economies, on the other hand, include China, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. The performances of these countries are evaluated by two means: the radar charts and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The first analysis shows that developed countries have accumulated more knowledge stock. They have also shaped a better resource environment relative to emerging countries. On the other hand, the DEA scores indicate that four of the small countries, Finland, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea, are relatively more efficient in generating further K-outputs when compared with the large economic giants such the US and Japan, and also other less-developed peers in term of GNI per capita.