INFORMATION PAPER NO. The case of the US above shows that funding for public schools has been historically a responsibility of local governments. DEFINITION: Public expenditure per student is the public current spending on education divided by the total number of students by level, as a percentage of GDP per capita. Expenditure on tertiary education (% of government expenditure - Data How much is spent per student on educational institutions - OECD The following visualization summarizes the effects of four different policy treatments within the so-called Teacher Community Assistant Initiative (TCAI) in Ghana this is an initiative that evaluated four different such remedial teaching interventions.35. This is a recent social achievement. Korea stifled by private education burden - Korea JoongAng Daily However, the UIS dataset has several missing observations, particularly for years prior to 2010. Public expenditure (current and capital) includes government spending on educational institutions (both public and private), education administration as . The data does suggest, however, that there is large and persistent cross-country heterogeneity in the relative importance of education vis-a-vis other sectors, even within developing countries. All of our charts can be embedded in any site. The role of public funding for other levels of education is however quite different. (Link only to working paper), They conclude that evidence on the impact of monitoring on time in school is scarce and not encouraging[while] the evidence of the impact of monitoring on student learning is only somewhat more encouraging. Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Samir K.C., and Petra Sauer (2013) Age-Specific Education Inequality, Education Mobility and Income Growth Chart: How Much Do Countries Spend on Education? | Statista In 2014, the US spent an average of $16,268 a year to educate a pupil from primary through tertiary education, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD). UNESCOUIS (2016). The following visualization shows this through a series of graphs plotting changes in the Gini coefficient of the distribution of years of schooling across different world regions. And those that increase the benefits of higher effort and better academic performance such as merit scholarships are likely to improve learning outcomes (see Glewwe and Muralidharan 2016 for further details on the underlying policy interventions, plus further evidence and discussion of results). To a great extent, this is what drives large and remarkably persistent gaps in the education achievement between individuals in the same country, but in different socioeconomic environments. This leads to a natural question: are pay-for-performance teacher contracts an effective instrument to improve learning outcomes? Meta-analysis, Cost-effectiveness, and Statistical Power, Interpreting the evidence on life cycle skill formation, Public Health Expenditure as percent of GDP, Health Insurance Coverage as percent of labour force, Gross enrolment ratios by educational level, country and region, Highest diploma obtained (as percentage of 25+ age bracket), Average years of education of the population of 25 years and over, Government expenditure per pupil in selected countries, 1965-2010, Government expenditure on education as a percentage of gross national product, Cognitive performance of developing countries, Illiterates as a Percentage of the Population of 15 years and over, International student mobility in tertiary education, School resources and teaching conditions (Africa only), Adult education (Latin America and the Caribbean only), Disparities in teachers training, deployment, characteristics and working conditions at sub-national level (East and South West Asia only), Student-teacher ratio and average class size, Distribution of teachers by age and gender, Share of enrolment by type of institution, Share of enrolment by gender, programme orientation and mode of study, Share of international students enrolled by field of education, Share of international students enrolled by country of origin, Educational attainment and labour-force status, percentage of education expenditure in total gdp, per capita education expenditure in 2005 $ppp, percentage of education expendtiure in total expenditure. Help us do this work by making a donation. 1. Franais OECD Data Education spending Related topics Education Education spending covers expenditure on schools, universities and other public and private educational institutions. 2016. Education spending covers expenditure on schools, universities and other public and private educational institutions. The earlier remarks about trends in international education financing flows (namely that aid is very important in low-income countries, and that a relatively low and shrinking share of aid is going to primary levels), suggest that inequality in public spending will worsen in low income countries. For individual content and infographics in your Corporate Design, Across the U.S., schools in the top 1% by expenditure levels doled out over $40,500 per student, more than three times the national amount of median expenditures, according to the normed data. improving teacher experience and teacher education) tends to work better to improve learning outcomes than simply increasing the number of teachers per pupil. Get quick analyses with our professional research service. The last two decades have seen a small but general increase in the share of income that countries devote to education. The fact that expenditure on education does not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes is indicative of the intricate nature of the process through which such outcomes are produced. The following visualization presents three scatter plots using 2010 data to show the cross-country correlation between (i) education expenditure (as a share of GDP), (ii) mean years of schooling, and (iii) mean PISA test scores. Welch, F., & Hanushek, E. A. The largest part of funding devoted to education in OECD countries goes to finance current expenditures, mainly compensation of staff specifically, teachers. The logic is that individuals may not spend enough on education because they fail to internalize the positive effect that their education has on other people. by measuring outcomes at several points in time). The most recent data, released on May 11, 2020, is from the 2018 fiscal year. volunteering, political participation) and interpersonal trust. Social return include pro-social behaviour (e.g. Malawi is a stark example: tertiary education is almost completely subsidised by the state, yet household contribute almost 20% of the costs of primary education. The source for the visualization below Tanzi & Schuktnecht (2000) compiles estimates from many sources, including: League of Nations Statistical Yearbook (various years), Mitchell (1962), OECD Education at a Glance (1996), UNESCO World Education Report (1993), UNDP Human Development Report (1996), UN World Economics Survey (various years). New York is on top of the state rankings for public US education spending with $24,040 allotted per pupil, which is $16,416 more than the amount spent in Utah, the state at the bottommost of the US education budget list. Illinois - 8.2%. In all the OECD countries, the share of spending devoted to compensation of teachers is by far the largest component of current expenditure. please visit our agency website, Your contact to the Infographics Newsroom, Find your information in our database containing over 20,000 reports, Our infographics team prepares current information in a clear and understandable format, Relevant facts covering media, economy, e-commerce, and FMCG topics, Use our newsletter overview to manage the topics that you have subscribed to. The UIS has been maintained since 1999 with the intent of providing comparable expenditure figures across countries and time, and its estimates rely on reports submitted by ministries and national statistics offices. To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts. That positive externalities justify government intervention in the provision of education is essentially an efficiency argument. Indeed, a significant part of the debate on education inequalities in the US today focuses on the importance of increasing progressive federal spending to reduce inequalities in public school funding.7. Collected information encompasses data on educational programmes, access, participation, progression, completion, literacy, educational attainment and human and financial resources. We see that treating children for intestinal worms (labeled deworming in the chart) led to an additional 13.9 years of education for every $100 spent in Kenya; while a program targeting anaemia (labeled iron fortification) led to 2.7 additional years per $100 in India. ), Chetty, Raj, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff. Annual spending per student at these levels ranged from around USD 3 100 in Colombia to around USD 18 000 in Norway and the . Alternative incentive mechanisms, such as community-based monitoring of teachers, have been proposed as an alternative. Data as of February 2020. The visualization presents OECD-average expenditure on education institutions by source of funds.17 By clicking on the option labeled relative you can see the corresponding share of each source: private funding went up from 7.9% in 2000, to 9.4% in 2012. The OECD provides country-specific figures. In the UIS database, government expenditure on education includes spending by local/municipal, regional and national governments, on public and private educational institutions, education administration, and subsidies for private entities (students/households and other privates entities). In principle, expenditure on pre-primary levels as well as expenditure sourced with transfers from international sources to government, are included. However, within high-income countries there is substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which pre-primary education is publicly financed. Hanushek, E. A., (2006). Handbook of the Economics of Education, Volume 5. Handbook of the Economics of Education, Two Volumes. Elsevier. For reference, the correlation for all countries in this scatter plot is 0.24. Overall, New York schools lead the nation in per-pupil spending with a median of $25,358. The US spends more on education than other countries - The Guardian In the following sections we explore evidence regarding the returns to household inputs (i.e. A vast number of studies have tried to estimate the impact of classroom resources on learning outcomes. (2006). Borrowers shouldn't be stuck waiting on the justices too much longer . 1. UNESCO Institute for Statistics ( uis.unesco.org ). Which countries receive the most aid from the US? How much is spent per student on educational institutions? U.S. School System Spending Per Pupil by Region - Census.gov Simply copy the HTML code that is shown for the relevant statistic in order to integrate it. And it is also consistent with a recent high-quality study on the impact of teacher quality on test scores using data from the US, which suggests that improvements in teacher quality can causally raise students test scores (evidence from Chetty et al. This suggests that the improvements in outcomes were caused by the combination of targeted instruction and TCAs who, unlike teachers, were specifically dedicated to this purpose. As it can be seen, states and localities are and have always been the main sources of funding for public primary education in the US. P. Glewwe, K. Muralidharan (2016). As usual, a selection of countries is shown by default, but other countries can be added by clicking on the relevant option at the top of the chart. Published by Leander von Kameke , May 2, 2022 In 2019, the government expenditure on education in Mongolia was approximately 4.94 percent of the national GDP. A comparison of expenditure between public and private education institutions is helpful to contextualize the role the public sector played in the process of education expansion in industrialized countries. As we can see, the evidence suggests interventions that increase the benefits of attending school such as conditional cash transfers are likely to increase student time in school. 6). Those individuals with upper secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education are taken as the reference group, so the percentage point difference is expressed in relation to this group. During this period, current expenditures per pupil were lowest in 2012-13 ($13,130) and then increased each year from 2012-13 to 2019-20. learning outcomes, such as test scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment PISA). 10. Expenditures per FTE student at the elementary/secondary level varied across OECD countries 2 in 2018, ranging from $3,100 in Mexico to $24,000 in Luxembourg. Available online here. How Much Do Countries Spend on Education? The spending increased 10.8 percent despite the decline in student numbers. More specifically, the Perry pre-school experiment consisted in enrolling 65 randomly selected black children in a pre-school program, and comparing their outcomes later in life against those achieved by a control group of roughly the same size. Please note that the code must be integrated into the HTML code (not only the text) for WordPress pages and other CMS sites. List of countries by spending on education (% of GDP) All the software and code that we write is open source and made available via GitHub under the permissive MIT license. In this table, the left-hand side summarizes results from econometric studies focusing on developing countries, while the right-hand side presents evidence from the US (where studies have concentrated extensively). Moreover, expenditure on teachers compensation is larger at the combined primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary levels of education than at the tertiary level. The following table provides further details regarding the type of expenditures that comprise current spending. https://www.ifpri.org/publication/statistics-public-expenditures-economic-development-speed, Financing education: Opportunities for global action, http://www.foreurope.eu/fileadmin/documents/pdf/Workingpapers/WWWforEurope_WPS_no006_MS15.pdf, Improving Education Outcomes in Developing Countries: Evidence, Knowledge Gaps, and Policy Implications, Comparative cost-effectiveness analysis to inform policy in developing countries: a general framework with applications for education, Does Mass Deworming Affect Child Nutrition? Does money buy strong performance in PISA? This source relies primarily on data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In comparison to countries where education started expanding later, European countries tend to assign relatively more of their government education budgets to the secondary and tertiary levels, while at the same time devoting relatively less of their general government budgets to education as a whole. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality and higher values indicate higher inequality you can read about the definition and estimation of Gini coefficients in our entry on income inequality. Glewwe and Muralidharan (2016)38 provide the following account of the available evidence: Results suggest that even modest changes to compensation structures to reward teachers on the basis of objective measures of performance (such as attendance or increases in student test scores) can generate substantial improvements in learning outcomes at a fraction of the cost of a business as usual expansion in education spending. The following visualization shows government expenditure on education as a share of total government expenditure. North Holland. One of the reasons to justify government intervention in the market for education, is that education generates positive externalities.25 This essentially means that investing in education yields both private and social returns. The height of each bar in this graph reflects the additional school years achieved per hundred dollars spent on the corresponding intervention; so these estimates can be interpreted as a measure of how cost-effective the different interventions are.42. For both of these levels of education, the lowest average levels of support per pupil/student were recorded in Greece and Croatia. Another important source is the OECD this is arguably the most comprehensive database in terms of variables and regularity of observations. In this case the available data does not suggest a discernible global pattern. All other material, including data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data, is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. 201243). Average reading performance in PISA and average spending per student; Education expenditure as share of GDP in the United States; Education spending as a share of total government expenditure; Funding sources for public schools; GDP per capita vs. staff compensation as share of total expenditure in primary public education The recent UNICEF report The Investment Case for Education and Equity shows that in low income countries, on average 46 percent of public resources are allocated to the 10 percent of students who are most educated while this figure goes down to 26 and 13 percent in lower-middle and upper-middle income countries respectively. This serves as a benchmark for lower education levels, where instruction takes an even larger share of expenditure.18, Following the agreement of the Millennium Development Goals, the first decade of the 21st century saw an important increase in international financial flows under the umbrella of development assistance (often also called development aid, or simply aid). 10 Countries That Spend the Most on Education per Student However, there is relatively little variation across OECD countries in this respect. Countries Compared by Education > Spending per student - NationMaster In higher levels of education (i.e. Average current expenditures per pupil enrolled in the fall in public elementary and secondary schools increased by 9 percent from 2010-11 ($13,601) to 2019-20 ($14,789). Overview and forecasts on trending topics, Industry and market insights and forecasts, Key figures and rankings about companies and products, Consumer and brand insights and preferences in various industries, Detailed information about political and social topics, All key figures about countries and regions, Market forecast and expert KPIs for 1000+ markets in 190+ countries & territories, Insights on consumer attitudes and behavior worldwide, Business information on 70m+ public and private companies, Detailed information for 35,000+ online stores and marketplaces. Other programs have similarly shown evidence of very large and persistent returns to early education interventions. The most common source of up-to-date cross-country education data is UNESCOs Institute for Statistics (UIS). Education Spending Per Student By State - Governing For a further discussion of these issues see the UIS data collection manual . (2006) provide a detailed account of the theory and evidence behind this claim, and discuss its implications for the design of education policies. primary, secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary) the share of current expenditure is very large and exhibits little cross-country variation between 90 and 97 percent of total expenditure corresponds to current expenditure across all of the OECD countries. Further information on cost-effectiveness analysis is available from the source of the graph. But when it comes to total spending, the comparison isn't remotely close. Comparatively, the government. This is the source used for the OECDs periodic report Education at a Glance. However, not all performance pay programs are likely to be effective, so it is quite important to design the bonus formulae well and to make sure that these designs reflect insights from economic theory. 39, The conclusion is that well-designed pay-for-performance contracts are a cost-effective instrument to boost test scores; but this does not mean that they are necessarily effective at achieving other perhaps equally important objectives of time spent in school. When publishing one of these graphics, It can be seen that as inequality is falling over time, the level of inequality is higher for older generations than it is for younger generations. Several studies with more sophisticated econometric models corroborate the fact that expenditure on education does not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes.28 You can read more about test scores and learning outcomes in our entry on Quality of Education. It shows that instruction accounts for almost half of expenditure; and while there are some small differences across sectors, there is a fair amount of stability in expenditures across time. Specifically, this chart shows a breakdown of expenditure for tertiary-level institutions in the US (public and private), during the period 1980-1997. Education in low-income countries is particularly difficult because there is substantial heterogeneity in the degree of preparation that children have when they enter school much more so than in high-income countries. In most countries basic education is nowadays perceived not only as a right, but also as a duty governments are typically expected to ensure access to basic education, while citizens are often required by law to attain education up to a certain basic level.1. Public School Spending Per Pupil Increases - Census.gov Indeed, most of the available evidence on whether teacher quality and quantity matters is difficult to interpret causally, as it is hard to find instances where teacher quality / quantity varies exogenously. The following chart plots trends in public expenditure on education as a share of GDP. The breakdown by age gives us a view into the future: as the inequality is lower among todays younger generations, we can expect the decline of inequality to continue in the future. To gauge the extent to which UIS data is reliable, the following visualization shows the proportions of regular and irregular data that countries make available (where Regular means data is available at least once every 3 years; and Irregular means data is available less frequently than every 3 years). Public schools in the US currently educate more than 90% of all children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools.6, This is the result of a process of education expansion that relied heavily on public funding, particularly from local governments. You can read more about development assistance for healthcare in our entry on Financing Healthcare. Countries Compared by Education > Spending per secondary school student Handbook of the Economics of Education, 2. The share of development assistance going to sub-Saharan Africa has decreased as a whole from 55 percent in 2002 to 40 percent in 2013 , but as we note the drop specifically for primary education has been steeper. Specifically, the share of development assistance for primary education going to sub-Saharan Africa has been decreasing sharply since the agreement of the Millennium Development Goals. It can be seen that European countries (marked again in light orange) are mostly located in the bottom-left. At a cross-sectional level, expenditure on education correlates positively with both quantity and quality measures; and not surprisingly, the quality and quantity measures also correlate positively with each-other. To the extent that low-income countries remain poorer than high-income countries, gaps in levels of expenditure per pupil are persistently large. This was not always the case: the advancement of these ideas began in the mid 19th century, when most of todays industrialized countries started expanding primary education, mainly through public finances and government intervention. More precisely, this chart plots the percentage-point difference in the likelihood of reporting to trust others, by education level of respondents. Have gains from historical education expansion fully materialized? Use is, however, only permitted with These changes in the priorization of development assistance for education across levels and regions, can have potentially large distributional effects, particularly within low income countries that depend substantially on this source of funding for basic education.4.