GLOBAL RISE ON EDUCATION

Education is widely accepted to be a fundamental resource, both for individuals and societies. Indeed, 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.

In this entry we begin by providing an overview of long run changes in education outcomes and outputs across the world, focusing both on quantity and quality measures of education attainment; and then provide an analysis of available evidence on the determinants and consequences of education.

From a historical perspective, the world went through a great expansion in education over the past two centuries. This can be seen across all quantity measures. Global literacy rates have been climbing over the course of the last two centuries, mainly though increasing rates of enrollment in primary education. Secondary and tertiary education have also seen drastic growth, with global average years of schooling being much higher now than a hundred years ago. Despite all these worldwide improvements, some countries have been lagging behind, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are still countries that have literacy rates below 50% among the youth.

Data on the production of education shows that schooling tends to be largely financed with public resources across the globe, although a great deal of heterogeneity is observed between countries and world regions. Since differences in national expenditure on education do not explain well cross-country differences in learning outcomes, the data suggests that generic policies that increase expenditure on standard inputs, such as the number of teachers, are unlikely to be effective to improve education outcomes.

Regarding the consequences of education, a growing body of empirical research suggests that better education yields higher individual income and contributes towards the construction of social capital and long-term economic growth.

The Evolution of Education Outcomes:

Literacy is a key skill and a key measure of a population’s education. UNESCO operationalizes the measurement of literacy as the ability to both read and write a short, simple statement about one's own life. Literacy rates are determined by literacy questions in a census or sample survey of a population, in standardized tests of literacy, or via extrapolation from statistics about school enrollment and educational attainment.

Statistics of literacy rates for recent decades are published by statistical offices. For earlier periods, historians have to reconstruct data from other sources. The most common method is to calculate the share of those people who could sign official documents (e.g. court documents).

How has global literacy evolved in the last two centuries?

While the earliest forms of written communication date back to about 3,500-3,000 BCE, literacy remained for centuries a very restricted technology closely associated with the exercise of power. It was only until the Middle Ages that book production started growing and literacy among the general population slowly started becoming important in the Western World.3 In fact, while the ambition of universal literacy in Europe was a fundamental reform born from the Enlightment, it took centuries for it to happen. Even in early-industrialized countries it was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that rates of literacy approached universality.

The following visualization presents estimates of world literacy for the period 1800-2014. As we can see, literacy rates grew constantly but rather slowly until the beginning of the twentieth century. And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. You can read more about the expansion of education systems around the world in our entry on Financing Education.

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