 The Economics of International Differences in Educational AchievementEric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann No 15949, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit institutional variation that does not exist within countries; draw on much larger variation than usually available within any country; reveal whether any result is country-specific or more general; test whether effects are systematically heterogeneous in different settings; circumvent selection issues that plague within-country identification by using system-level aggregated measures; and uncover general-equilibrium effects that often elude studies in a single country. The advantages come at the price of concerns about the limited number of country observations, the mostly cross-sectional character of available achievement data, and possible bias from unobserved country factors such as culture. This chapter reviews the economic literature on international differences in educational achievement, restricting itself to comparative analyses that are not possible within single countries and placing particular emphasis on studies trying to address key issues of empirical identification. While quantitative input measures show little impact, several measures of institutional structures and of the quality of the teaching force can account for significant portions of the immense international differences in the level and equity of student achievement. Variations in skills measured by the international achievement tests are in turn strongly related to individual labor-market outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, to cross-country variations in economic growth. JEL-codes: H4 H5 I20 J24 J31 O15 O4 P5 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published as T h e E c o n o m i c s o f I n t e r n a t i o n a l D i f f e r e n c e s i n E d u c a t i o n a l A c h i e v e m e n t ( w i t h L u d g e r W o e s s m a n n ) i n E r i c A . H a n u s h e k , S t e p h e n M a c h i n a n d L u d g e r W o e s s m a n n ( e d . ) . H a n d b o o k o f t h e E c o n o m i c s o f E d u c a t i o n , V o l . 3 , A m s t e r d a m : N o r t h H o l l a n d , 2 0 1 1 , p p . 8 9 - 2 0 0 . Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15949 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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