Picking Up Big Bills from the Sidewalk: The Supply of and Demand for Quality Basic Education in India and Brazil

Abstract

Despite the robust, bicausal relationship between quality primary education and sustainable, equitable development, two of the world’s fastest-growing democracies – India and Brazil – continue to lag behind their regional and economic peers in basic learning outcomes. In this article, we use a supply and demand framework to identify six institutional factors that we hypothesize may be determinative in shaping education outcomes in both countries. On the demand side, we first consider whether the actual demand for quality basic education in India and Brazil is as robust as the theoretical and empirical literature linking it to well-being would predict, examining how the real and perceived individual returns to education may affect the value people attach to schooling attainment and learning outcomes. We next investigate whether consumers and citizens possess sufficient information about the quality of the educational services provided by the state to induce demand for better schools. Finally we analyze the growth in private schools, exploring whether the existence of non-governmental alternatives undermines popular pressure on politicians and policymakers. Turning next to the supply of educational services, we examine how India and Brazil finance education, considering absolute levels of public expenditures as well as the allocation of such funds (geographically, by academic level, and by type of input). We next explore the incentives that educational management structures at the national, state/regional, district, and school levels generate for teachers, principals, and other educational administrators. Finally, we analyze public accountability mechanisms in both countries, investigating monitoring, evaluation, and reporting systems as well as anti-corruption initiatives and considering how political structures affect the responsiveness of leaders at various levels of government.