Business investment in education in emerging markets since the 1960s

Abstract

This article examines non-profit investments by business in education in emerging markets between the 1960s and the present day. Using a sample of 110 interviews with business leaders from a recently developed oral history database, the study shows that more than three-quarters of such leaders invested in education as a non-profit activity. The article explores three different types of motivations behind such high levels of engagement with education: values driven, context focussed, and firm focussed. The article identifies significant regional variations in terms of investment execution, structure, and impact. In South and Southeast Asia, there was a preference for long-term investment in primary and secondary education. In Africa and Latin America, some initiatives sometimes had a shorter-term connotation, but with high-profile projects in partnerships with international organisations and foreign universities. In Turkey, there was heavy focus on training and the creation of universities. The article concludes by examining the impact of this investment, comparing Chile and India especially. It discusses issues such as the paucity of financial data and the challenges of comparing different types of educational spending, which make robust conclusions hard, but does suggest that although such spending did not resolve major educational roadblocks across the emerging world, it represented a positive overall social gain.

Keywords:

• Business history
• economic history
• oral history
• education
• emerging markets
• reputation
• philanthropy
• CSR

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous referees for the helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. We would also like to thank the Division of Research and Faculty Development at the Harvard Business School for funding the research on which this article is based. We are very grateful for the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University for funding a conference on Business and Education held at the Regional Office, Santiago on May 28, 2019. A special thanks to Marcella Renteria for making this event happen, and for the participants who discussed and offered invaluable insights on the ideas behind this paper. We are also grateful to the comments of the participants of the session on Reputation and Resilience in Emerging Markets at the Business History Conference, Baltimore, April 6–8 2018, where an early draft of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These are: Aga (2017); Bazan (2017); Fortabat (2008); Kamdani (2016); Miziya (2015); Sabancı (2014).

2 Claro (2008); Esteves (2013); Quesada (2013); Salinas-Pliego (2013).

3 Aga (2017); Bajaj (2014); Chandra (2016); Husain (2016); Kapur (2015); Oberoi (2015); Reddy (2014).

4 Aga (2017); Bajaj (2014); Bhatt (2017); Chetti (2014); Dudeja (2018); Hamied (2014); Jain (2018).

5 Akın (2015); Azeri (2014); Aziz (2016); Babar Ali (2016); Bazan (2017); Belo-Osagie (2002); Bhatt (2017); Boyner (2014); Burman (2017); Chandaria (2014); Chandra (2016); Dudeja (2018); Fortabat (2008); Hamied (2014); Husain (2016); Ibrahim (2017); Kamdani (2016); Kumar (2015); Mahindra (2013); Mazumdar-Shaw (2018); Merril (2015); Mittal (2017); Miziya (2015); Mody (2017); Muraya (2013); Özyeğin (2014); Salinas-Pliego (2013); Selçuk (2014); Shetty (2017); Simbadequa (2017); Tata (2015); Trajano (2008); Vaghul (2017); Vargi (2014); Wavamunno (2013).

6 Annual reports include financials for only two of the Luksic foundations: Fundación Luksic Total Social Investment expenditure for 2017 was Chilean pesos 1.522.964.521 (approx. 2.2 million dollars); The reported expenditures for Oportunidad, Fundación Educational from 2008 to 2018 was Chilean pesos 11.957.000.000 (US $17.6 million or an average of US $1.6 million dollars per year).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valeria Giacomin

Valeria Giacomin is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Business History at Copenhagen Business School. In 2017/2018 she was Harvard Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School. She researches clustering, global history and corporate reputation with a focus on emerging markets. Her work has been published in Business History, Enterprise & Society, Journal of Global History, and Management & Organizational History.

Geoffrey Jones

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School in the United States. His recent books include Beauty Imagined, A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Oxford University Press, 2010), Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).

Erica H. Salvaj

Erica Salvaj is Associate Professor of General Management and Strategy at Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile and visiting professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Argentina. She researches strategy, leadership, organisational change, social networks, corporate governance and business history, with a special interest in Latin America. Her publications have appeared Business History, Enterprise & Society, Business History Review, Global Strategy Journal, Journal of Business Research, Harvard Business Review, Corporate Governance: an International Review and elsewhere.