Both SMU Associate Professors of Economics Huang Fali and Chang Pao Li are fascinated with the interaction between education systems and international trade. In their first joint research project, entitled “Trade and Divergence in Education Systems”, they focused on the interactions between education, workforce diversity and trade. After pouring through the literature, they identified that a critical dimension of education systems – the degree of curriculum centralisation – had yet to be subject to empirical study. Hence, they constructed this measure from scratch based on raw data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Doing so, they found a robust link between the degree of curriculum centralisation and a country’s talent distribution. They found that when a homogenous curriculum was adopted, it resulted in both talent homogeneity as well as increased mean ability.