Who Profits from the Public Funding of Education: A Comparison of World Regions

Abstract

Several approaches can be taken to analyze equity in the educational sector. In general, three main approaches can be distinguished. The first takes the school as a given good and analyzes the access to given levels of education by various population subgroups. Under this genre of analysis, researchers have also delved into the relationship between student achievement and students' personal and social backgrounds, as well as their access to school resources.' The second approach starts by first making explicit the gains that are associated with access to a particular level of education. Two aspects can be considered: (1) the appropriation of public resources that have been used to subsidize the provision of education,2 and (2) the anticipation of higher future earnings.3 Finally, in the third approach the issue of equity is addressed by comparing the gains accruing to various groups in the population with the financial (tax) contribution made by these groups to overall government revenue.4 In this article, we take the second of these approaches and shall focus on equity in the distribution of public resources for education. As we have shown in an earlier paper,5 the outcome depends on two complementary factors: (1) the distribution of public resources for education among members of a given generation according to their terminal level of schooling, and (2) the characteristics (socioeconomic, sex, ethnic or