It has had some Irish luck on its side. It offered investors among the lowest wage costs in the European Union during the period from the late 1980s when Europe was moving towards what is now the common Euro currency.
Monetary union sparked an explosion of trade among the European countries and an influx of American and Japanese multinationals seeking to join the bonanza.
The EU countries with the lowest initial wages, Ireland and Portugal, have grown fastest as a result of this foreign investment.
They have also received huge subsidies from the EU, peaking at 5.7 per cent of Ireland's national income in 1992.
However, luck alone can't account for Ireland's success. After all, Greece had even lower initial wage costs, and has also had massive EU subsidies, but has grown at an average rate of only 1.6 per cent a year since 1988, compared with Ireland's 6.7 per cent.
Ireland has built on its luck by offering investors much more. First, it negotiated deals in which the unions accepted wage restraint in exchange for tax cuts and social spending.
Second, way back in 1981, it cut the company tax rate on manufacturing to 10 per cent. It is now cutting the general company tax rate from 28 per cent to 12.5 per cent by 2003.
Third, its Industrial Development Agency (IDA Ireland), whose chief executive Sean Dorgan will speak at the Knowledge Wave conference, has paid huge subsidies to persuade multinationals to locate in Ireland.
In 1989, it paid the equivalent of $NZ90,000 a job to induce Intel to make silicon chips near Dublin.
Finally, Ireland has also invested in its people. Fees for fulltime undergraduate university courses have been abolished. However, it still spends a lower share of its national income on education than New Zealand does.
SINGAPORE
Leading the pack
A decade or so before Ireland, according to Irish writer Denis O'Hearn, Singapore "was the first country to successfully base its economic growth on concentrated investments from targeted foreign sectors".
Since 1961, its Economic Development Board has scoured the world for companies that might be interested in investing in Singapore, offering them tax exemptions for five to 10 years, ready-made facilities in industrial parks and often co-investment by the board or other state-owned companies.
At present the four targeted sectors are electronics, chemicals, engineering and biomedical sciences.
"We look at the areas of high growth, high technology, high knowledge content," says board communications manager Koh Buck Song.
"Then we systematically woo the global leaders in each of those areas to attract them to Singapore."
Last year the board invested $NZ670 million in 58 projects - 90 per cent of them "early-stage technology companies such as communications, including wireless application protocol, information technology, e-commerce and biomedical sciences."
The board is also spending several billion dollars developing industrial parks and whole cities in China, India, Vietnam and Indonesia. It has provided tax breaks for more than 200 multinationals to base operations on the island.
Singapore can afford to invest this kind of money because it boasts the world's highest savings rate of just over 50 per cent - an outcome of massive government surpluses and compulsory superannuation contributions, currently 20 per cent of wages from employees plus a further 16 per cent from their employers.
The Knowledge Wave conference will hear from Singapore's Trade and Industry Minister, Brigadier-General George Yeo, and the vice-chancellor of the National University of Singapore, Professor Shih Choon Fong.
ISRAEL
Knowledge society
Israel's growth record has been slower than Ireland's or Korea's. But two Israeli speakers, business leader Gurion Meltzer and educator Nehemia Levtzion, have been invited to the conference because Israel has invested more than any other country in the foundations of a knowledge society: education and research.
Along with the United States, Israel has a higher proportion of its working-age population with university degrees (25 per cent) than any other country. In New Zealand, only 13 per cent of the working age group have degrees.
It spends the most from government funds on education (6.7 per cent of national income). Including student fees and other private spending, Israelis spend 9.1 per cent of their national income on education, by far the world's highest.
Two-thirds of the block grants to universities go for teaching, based on roll numbers. The other third is for research and is allocated to universities on the basis of how much they earn from other research funds, their number of doctoral students and their scientific publications.
Israel also spends more than most countries on research and development.
The government has established 26 industrial 'incubators' where it not only pays for administration and advice but also up to 85 per cent of the costs of new businesses up to $NZ340,000 a year for two years.
FINLAND
Investing in research
Finland has become an economic star even more recently than Ireland, recovering strongly after a deep recession when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-90. Its growth from 1993 to 2000 averaged 4.7 per cent a year.
Last month the United Nations technology achievement index ranked Finland first, because it has the world's highest proportion of tertiary students studying maths, science or engineering (27 per cent, compared to New Zealand's 13 per cent) and the second-highest ratio of 'always on' internet connections to people.
It is a unique case, because as much as a fifth of its total growth in some years has been due to a single company, cellphone maker Nokia.
But Nokia's success has been built on a deliberate Finnish policy, after the recession of the early 1990s, to boost research and development from 1.9 per cent of national income to 3 per cent. The target was achieved in 1998.
Money has been poured into the Technology Development Centre (Tekes), which provides loans and grants to private sector R&D. It also organises collaborative research - about 60 research programmes involving 1600 companies.
Sixteen technology parks, all with their own business 'incubators' to advise and assist new businesses, have been set up by companies owned jointly by universities, public research institutes and private industry.
A venture capital fund, Sitra, has an endowment fund of almost NZ $1 billion, financed from the sale of state enterprises and It has invested in more than 100 businesses.
A former Sitra president, Professor Jorma Routti, will speak at the conference.
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