As many of the articles in this issue of The McKinsey Quarterly demonstrate, companies in the developed world are outsourcing ever larger portions of their business to low-cost, highly skilled workers in the developing world. Driving this trend is the remarkable ability of the global workforce to learn on the job.

In fact, the relationship between formal education and economic growth in poor countries is widely misunderstood by economists and politicians alike. Progress in both areas is undoubtedly necessary for the social, political, and intellectual development of these and all other societies; however, the conventional view that education should be one of the very highest priorities for promoting rapid economic development in poor countries is wrong. We are fortunate that it is, because building new educational systems there and putting enough people through them to improve economic performance would require two or three generations. The research of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) during the past decade has consistently shown that workers in all countries can be trained on the job to achieve radically higher productivity and, as a result, radically higher standards of living. Brazil, India, and Russia could all double their GDP per capita with their present workforce—and...