Inequality in the World , 1950-2010 : Estimates from a New Data Set ☆ (original) (raw)
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The research on educational inequality plays an essential role in characterizing the fairness and effectiveness of educational systems, and monitoring and evaluating processes of educational development. This paper introduces a new quinquennial data set of educational inequality of 146 countries, from 1950 to 2010, and it is the first to present a Gini index of education by 5-year age intervals and by sex for a broad panel. We use the Gini index of education as a measure of the distribution of years of schooling, with a more in-depth approach, compared to existing data sets (). We use data on educational attainment of Barro and Lee taking into consideration, for the first time, the over time changes on the duration of schooling cycles, in each country and for each age group. This approach can significantly improve the measurement of inequality in education by producing estimates of the Gini Index of Education more realistic and reliable especially when it comes to international comparisons. We made a decomposition of the overall educational inequality to measure the contribution of each component. The results show that (i) even though educational inequality has been declining for most countries during the last six decades, it is not occurring in a uniform manner because it depends on age group, gender and development level for each country or region. (ii) The data indicate the existence of the Education Kuznets Curve when we consider the standard deviation of schooling. (iii) It also suggests that the average years of schooling and the Gini index of education are negatively related. JEL Classification code: D63, I21, J24, O15
This paper introduces a new quinquennial dataset of educational inequality disaggregated by age group for 146 countries, from 1950 to 2010, by using the Gini index of education as a measure of the distribution of years of schooling, with a more in-depth approach compared to existing datasets. Based on recent estimates of average years of schooling from Barro and Lee (2010), our calculations take into consideration, for the first time, the changes over time in the duration of educational stages, in each country and for each age group. Education inequality, more manifest in developing countries in the 1950s, is strongly lowered over the period. Still, in 2010, the level remains higher than in advanced countries. In terms of educational policy in these countries, more attention is needed to improving basic education and to reducing dropout rates in primary and secondary schools, which leads to greater school achievement in a quantitative sense
Measuring and Analysing Educational Inequality
2006
Crosscountry research on educational inequality presents contrasting views on the extent of educational inequality in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. The differences in opinion also concern the relation between educational inequality and income inequality. This paper argues that part of the reported results are influenced by the type of inequality indicator applied. Moreover, there may be a separate effect of educational attainment and educational distribution on income inequality, which cannot be discerned properly by conventional indicators (in particular the Gini-coefficient faces this problem). A new indicator of educational distribution, which we coined the grade enrolment ratio, focuses at the distribution of students among consecutive grades in schooling, apart from average years of schooling (attainment). We find that the grade enrolment ratio outperforms the other indicators in explaining crosscountry variation in income inequality and accurately assesses Latin American and Sub-Saharan African educational inequality.
Inequality in Educational Development from 1900 to 2015
Classes - From National to Global Class Formation
The industrial revolution marked a turning point in mankind as it not only initiated an economic turn from predominantly agricultural to industrialized societies but also shaped the need for an education revolution. This was the period when most industrialized societies implemented compulsory schooling systems and created the opportunity for universal access to basic education and later medium and higher education levels. However, this did not occur at the same speed everywhere, generating divergence between countries, and subsocieties within countries, whether it was at the level of residence, gender, generation, or class. Based on a dataset developed at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital reconstructing levels of education in 5-year steps by age (5-year age groups) and sex for a large number of countries in the world, we look at the education transition from 1900 to 2015 to uncover different patterns and pathways of educational improvements that might explain the differences in the level of human capital today.
2Measuring Education Inequality: Gini Coefficients of Education
2000
comments and suggestions, and the Bank’s Research Committee for providing a part of the funding. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors or the countries they represent. Comments and questions should be sent to the corresponding authors, Yan Wang at ywang2@worldbank.org and/or Xibo Fan at
Bulletin of Applied Economics, 2022
We briefly survey the literature which uses data for Gini coefficients of education. We update the Gini coefficients of education to include the year 2015, added to the Barro-Lee data set recently, and compare them to those of the earlier data set based on older Barro-Lee data. A panel analysis shows that every five years education inequality falls by 2.8 percentage points. A stable average value is predicted to be 0.22. Kernel density world distributions for education Ginis loose their twin peaks when going from 1955 to later years, and the right tail of the distribution with high inequality is losing mass over time.