in the united states of students can be considered resilient in the sense that they come from the of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged students but nevertheless perform much belter than would be predicted based on their socioeconomic background is also the average in the oecd figure however in korea hong kongchina and shanghaichina the share of disadvantaged students who excel at school despite their disadvantaged background is about twice as high using economic modelling to relate cognitive skills as measured by pisa and other international instruments to economic growth shows with some caveats that even smal i improvements in the skills of a nations labour force can have large impacts on that countrys future wellbeing bringing the united states up to the average performance of finland the bestperforming education system among oecd countries could result in gains in the order of usd trillion