New research suggests that if American students up their math skills to match those of South Korean students, the U.S. GDP could increase by 75-trillion dollars over an 80 years.

A research team of the education policy and governance program at Harvard University Kennedy School compared and analyzed math and reading skills of 15 year-old students in 65 nations, concluding that math is the most critical for a nation’s economic development.

Using the results from the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment, the team categorized math and reading abilities into three divisions: basic, proficient and advanced.

U.S. students were given a proficiency rate of 32-percent, ranking the nation’s students 32nd out of 65 nations. South Korean students ranked fourth with a 58-percent proficiency.

The research team says that the U.S. annual GDP would increase by a maximum of one-point-three percentage points if the same percentage of American students is as proficient as South Korean students in math. Their report, entitled “Globally Challenged: Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete,”states that since long-term average annual growth rates hover between two and three percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent, which averages out to around a trillion dollars a year in monetary terms.