The tertiary tilt: education and inequality in the developing world

Lloyd Gruber and Stephen Kosack

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Education is widely perceived to be a tonic for the rising inequality that often accompanies development. But most developing-country governments tilt their education spending toward higher education, which disproportionately benefits elites. We find that in countries with high "tertiary tilts," rising primary enrollment is associated a decade later with far higher inequality-not the lower Gini coefficients many would expect. Since most developing countries tilt their spending toward higher education, our analysis suggests that efforts that concentrate only on expanding mass education, such as the UN's Millennium Campaign, could end up raising inequality in much of the developing world.

Keywords: development; education; education spending; inequality; MDGs; primary education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published in World Development, February, 2014, 54, pp. 253-272. ISSN: 0305-750X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/54202/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:54202

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().