Education Matters: Global Schooling Gains from the 19th to the 21st Century

Abstract

In the past half century, human capital has emerged as one of the most active areas of research in economics. This book's efforts at constructing useful measures of educational attainment for a broad panel of countries go back 20 years. It extends earlier work by presenting and discussing a new long-term data set on educational attainment of the population for 146 countries for the period from 1870 to 2010. In addition, it provides new data on educational quality, based on internationally comparable test scores for 134 countries from 1965 to 2010. It uses the new data to analyze linkages across countries and over time between education and important economic and political variables, such as economic growth, fertility, and democracy. The book also presents projections of educational attainment for a broad group of countries up to 2040.