Mobilizing Resources for Education and Improving Spending Effectiveness : Establishing Realistic Benchmarks Based on Past Trends
This paper looks at how countries have mobilized additional resources for education and assesses their impact on access and learning outcomes, using the World Bank's new Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling measure. The paper shows that global...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/244151552329948414/Mobilizing-Resources-for-Education-and-Improving-Spending-Effectiveness-Establishing-Realistic-Benchmarks-Based-on-Past-Trends http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31399 |
| Summary: | This paper looks at how countries have
mobilized additional resources for education and assesses
their impact on access and learning outcomes, using the
World Bank's new Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling
measure. The paper shows that global spending on education
has risen significantly over the past two decades, although
spending as a share of gross domestic product has remained
relatively unchanged, at about 4.5 percent. However, global
trends mask large differences across regions and country
income groups. For example, low-income countries recorded
the largest increases in terms of the share of GDP spent on
education, but the absolute amount they devoted to education
remained low compared to other countries. Economic growth
has been the main driver of increases in public education
spending. Yet, countries that achieved the largest and most
rapid spending increases did this through a combination of
increases in overall government revenues, a greater
prioritization of education in the government budget as well
as healthy economic growth. Increases in public education
spending did not generally result in major improvements in
average education outcomes. Using the available data, the
paper shows that a doubling of government spending per child
led to an increase in learning-adjusted years of schooling
of only half a year. Preliminary findings also show that
countries with lower efficiency and spending are expected to
get the most from increases in spending in improved
education outcomes. The paper concludes by outlining an
approach that allows countries to assess their potential for
increasing education funding and the expected effects on
their education outcomes, based on benchmarks drawing from
the data of comparable countries. It also underscores the
urgent need to improve data on public education spending and
education outcomes, to extend this analysis to cover a wider
set of countries and increase the robustness of
country-level benchmarks. |
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