The Long-Run Decline of Education Quality in the Developing World

Alexis Le Nestour, Laura Moscoviz and Justin Sandefur
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Alexis Le Nestour: UNICEF Office of Research (Innocenti)
Laura Moscoviz: Center for Global Development
Justin Sandefur: Center for Global Development

No 608, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: We use comparable, survey-based literacy tests for repeated cross-sections of men and women born between 1950 and 2000 to study education outcomes across cohorts in 87 countries. We find that education quality, defined as literacy conditional on completing five years of schooling, stagnated across the developing world over half a century, including absolute declines in both South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Shifts in student composition clearly explain part of the downward trend we observe, but the decline pre-dates the abolition of school fees in most countries, and anthropometric data suggest students in later decades were healthier and wealthier than those in earlier cohorts. Globally, increases in schooling outpaced the decline in education quality, leading to a large increase in unconditional literacy.

Keywords: literacy; education quality; access to education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 N37 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2022-02-23, Revised 2023-09-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-his and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:608

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