The THE BRICS and Emerging Markets Rankings: Good News for China?

Times Higher Education (THE) has just published its BRICS and Emerging Economies Rankings. The methodology is the same as that used in their World University Rankings and the data was supplied by Thomson Reuters. Emerging economies are those listed in the FTSE Emerging Markets Indices.

At first sight, China appears to do very well with Peking University in first place and Tsinghua University in second and a total of  23 universities in the top 100.

Third place goes to the University of Cape Town while Taiwan National University is fourth and Bogazici University in Turkey is fifth.

Taiwan has 21 universities in the Top 100, India 10, Turkey 7 and South Africa and Thailand 5 each.

Although China tops the list of "hot emergent properties", as THE puts it, and Simon Marginson compares the PRC favourably to Russia which is "in the doldrums", we should remember that China does have a large population. When we look at population size, China's achievement shrinks considerably while Taiwan emerges as the undisputed winner, Eastern Europe does very well and the gap between Russia and China is drastically reduced.

The following is the number of universities in the the BRICS and Emerging Economies University Rankings per 1,000,000  population (Economist Pocket World in figures 2010) The total number of universities in the rankings is in brackets.

1.    Taiwan (21)   0.913
2.     United Arab Emirates (2)   0.400
3=    Czech Republic (3)  0.300
3=    Hungary   (3)   0.300
5.     Chile (2)   0.118
6.     South Africa (5)   0.114
7.     Poland (4)   0.102
8.     Turkey (7)   0.093
9=     Malaysia (2)   0.077
9=    Thailand (5)   0.077
11.    Egypt (3)   0.039
12.    Morocco (1)   0.0031
13.    Brazil (4)   0.021
14.   Colombia (1)   0.021
15.   Mexico (2)   0.018
16.   China (23)   0.017
17.    Russia (2)   0.014
18.    India (10)   0.008
19=   Indonesia (0)   0.000
19=   Pakistan (0)   0.000
19=   Peru   (0)   0.000
19=   Philippines   (0)   0.000


It is very significant that the top two universities in these rankings are in China.  But, taking population size into consideration, it looks as though Mainland China is still way behind Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong and even the smaller nations of Eastern Europe.