“West vs Asia education rankings are misleading”(NewScientist),
These findings make TIMSS and PISA rankings seem irrelevant. But it could be worse than that. In many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure.
Japanese students, for example, have always been near the top of the TIMSS. You might expect those high-flying students to be driving a high-flying economy. Yet the Japanese economy stagnated throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
There may be no causal connection, but the same negative correlation is seen elsewhere.