This book investigates how four leading Asia-Pacific nations have managed various forms of human resources, or “talent,” in their rise to economic power. In particular, it presents a comparative analysis of the talent development strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India: what Gi-Wook Shins call the four “talent giants.” While human resources have been crucial to these countries’ rise, their strategies in nurturing, attracting, and utilizing talent were not uniform, but varied considerably, reflecting their cultural, historical, and institutional differences. This is the first study to explain such cross-national variation in talent strategies among the four giants, which represent divergent paths to development. To undertake this historical-comparative research, this book presents a new framework to study human resource development, called “Talent Portfolio Theory,” that views a nation’s talent development, like financial investment, as creating a “talent portfolio” composed of four Bs: brain train, brain gain, brain circulation, and brain linkage. The new theory attends to the importance of maintaining a diversified talent portfolio, similar to a financial portfolio, by rebalancing it in order to sustain development through risks, both systematic and unsystematic. This study has policy implications as well, as it synthesizes the lessons of the four talent giants to offer recommendations for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.