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This paper investigates the impact of educational expenditures on economic growth for 18 Latin American countries over the period 1970–2009 by using cointegration test procedure in the presence of two unknown structural breaks. Considering structural breaks is necessary for our analysis because of that Latin American countries implemented important reforms to expand their educational systems and these reforms may affect the cointegrating relationship. The findings indicate that there is evidence of cointegrating relationship between educational expenditures and economic growth for the considered countries except Chile, Guyana, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Another finding of the paper is that identified structural breaks refer to the educational reform periods of Latin American countries.

Papers in the burgeoning empirical literature on distributive politics often focus their analysis on the pattern of distribution of a single patronage good—for example, cash transfers, roads, education spending, electrification, or targeted grants. Yet because governments can favor constituencies through the targeting of multiple public and private goods, drawing general conclusions about distributive politics by investigating just one (or even a few) good(s) can be misleading. We demonstrate the severity of this problem by investigating a particular manifestation of distributive politics—ethnic favoritism—in a particular setting—Africa—and show that the conclusions one draws about who benefits from government allocation decisions can vary markedly depending on the outcome one happens to study. Our findings suggest the need for caution in making general claims about who benefits from distributive politics and raise questions about extant theoretical conclusions that are based on empirical work that focuses on a single distributive outcome. The findings also provide a foundation for a new research agenda aimed at identifying the reasons why political leaders choose to favor their supporters with some public and private goods rather than others.

Education is crucially important for later outcomes but has received limited attention in comparative research on welfare states. In light of this, we present an exploratory analysis of education systems across fourteen EU countries and the US. This builds on existing work on educational institutions, educational outcomes and welfare regimes. We focus on institutional features associated with inequality of educational opportunity, including academic selection, tracking and public/private provision; on educational outcomes; and on education expenditure. Our quantitative analysis identifies four clusters of countries: the Nordic, Continental, Mediterranean and English-speaking, which bear similarities to those identified in the welfare states literature. Each ‘education regime’ is associated with particular institutional features, educational outcomes and levels of public expenditure. Our analysis suggests that further comparative research on education, viewed as a key component of the welfare state, is warranted.

This book gathers in one volume all the information needed to use ADePT Edu, the software platform created by the World Bank for the reporting and analysis of education indicators and education inequality. It includes a primer on education data availability, an operating manual for the software, a technical explanation of all the education indicators generated, and an overview of global education inequality using ADePT Edu. The World Bank developed ADePT Edu to fill the need for a user-friendly program designed to give everyone the ability to organize and analyze education data from households. ADePT Edu can be used with any household survey with the aid of its user friendly interface, generating education tables and graphics that comply with international standards for performance indicators. Because this volume is a compendium its chapters can be consulted independently of each other, depending on the need of users.

American higher education is in transition along many dimensions: tuition levels, faculty composition, expenditure allocation, pedagogy, technology, and more. During the last three decades, at private four-year academic institutions, undergraduate tuition levels increased each year on average by 3.5 percent more than the rate of inflation; the comparable increases for public four-year and public two-year institutions were 5.1 percent and 3.5 percent, respectively. Academic institutions have also changed how they allocate their resources. The percentage of faculty nationwide that is full-time has declined, and the vast majority of part-time faculty members do not have Ph.D.s. The share of institutional expenditures going to faculty salaries and benefits in both public and private institutions has fallen relative to the share going to nonfaculty uses like student services, academic support, and institutional support. There are changing modes of instruction, together with different uses of technology, as institutions reexamine the prevailing “lecture/discussion” format. A number of schools are charging differential tuition across students. This paper discusses these various changes, how they are distributed across higher education sectors, and their implications. I conclude with some speculations about the future of American education.

Total student loan debt rose to over $800 billion in June 2010, overtaking total credit card debt outstanding for the first time. By the time this article sees print, the continually updated Student Loan Debt Clock will show an accumulated total of roughly $1 trillion. Borrowing to finance educational expenditures has been increasing—more than quadrupling in real dollars since the early 1990s. The sheer magnitude of these figures has led to increased public commentary on the level of student borrowing. We move the discussion of student loans away from anecdote by establishing a framework for considering the use of student loans in the optimal financing of collegiate investments. From a financial perspective, enrolling in college is equivalent to signing up for a lottery with large expected gains—indeed, the figures presented here suggest that college is, on average, a better investment today than it was a generation ago—but it is also a lottery with significant probabilities of both larger positive, and smaller or even negative, returns. We look to available—albeit limited—evidence to assess which types of students are likely to be borrowing too much or too little.

In recent years, performance-based accountability regimes have become increasingly prevalent throughout government. One area where this has received considerable attention in recent years is higher education, where many states have adopted funding policies that seek to tie institutional funding to objective measures of performance. To what extent have these policies been effective tools for restructuring financial incentives and exerting influence over administrative behavior? Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, this article finds that performance-funding policies have not had substantial impacts on state budgets but that they have had some limited influence on institutional spending priorities. Furthermore, effects on institutional spending were found to be greater on public research universities than other public colleges.

While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where \"weak institutions\" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization.

Endogeneity between health and wealth presents a challenge for estimating causal effects of health shocks. Using a quasi-experimental design, comprising exogenous shocks sustained as bus accident injuries in India, with controls drawn from travelers on the same bus routes one year later, I present new evidence of causal effects on consumption and debt. Using primary household survey data, I find that households faced with shock-related expenditures are able to smooth consumption on food, housing, and festivals, with small reductions in educational spending. Debt was the principal mitigating mechanism households used, leading to significantly larger levels of indebtedness.

The goal of \"college-for-all\" in the United States has been pursued in an environment of rising tuition, stagnant grant aid and already strapped family budgets with the gap filled by college loans. College students are thus facing increasing levels of debt as they seek to develop their human capital and improve their career options. Debt is a useful resource for making needed investments. It is unique as a resource, however, because it must be repaid and can thus also increase vulnerabilities and limit options. We find that lower levels of educational debt do support college completion. However, additional educational debt beyond about $10,000 actually reduces the likelihood of college completion compared to lower levels of debt as the burden of repayment looms. Graduation likelihoods for students from the bottom 75% of the income distribution at public universities are especially influenced by debt. The article considers how the macro-level changes in financing societal functions influence the individual-level risks and vulnerabilities of life in a debt-based society.