When two Asian countries consistently graduate the world's greatest numbers of science and engineering PhDs, forgive the nervous twitching among wealthy western economies. After all, high technology and higher education are supposed to be the west's magic elixir for perpetual growth. Well, maybe not.

"The new competitors, China and India, are unlike any competitors we have seen in our lifetime, because they can bring limitless demographics and a strong technical underpinning," Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, observed earlier this year. "These are people who like being engineers. So it's a different competitor today . . . and that's made people afraid every place in the world."