A New Data Set of Educational Inequality in the World, 1950-2010: Gini Index of Education by Age Group

Abstract

The research on educational inequality plays an essential role in characterizing the fairness and effectiveness of educational systems, and monitoring and evaluating processes of educational development. This paper introduces a new quinquennial data set of educational inequality of 146 countries, from 1950 to 2010, and it is the first to present a Gini index of education by 5-year age intervals and by sex for a broad panel. We use the Gini index of education as a measure of the distribution of years of schooling, with a more in-depth approach, compared to existing data sets (Castello and Domenech, 2002; Thomas et al., 2001, 2003; Checchi, 2004; Araujo et al., 2004; Lim and Tang, 2008; Foldvari and Van Leeuwen, 2010; Morrisson and Murtin, 2010; Meschi and Scervini, 2010; Castello, 2010a). We use data on educational attainment of Barro and Lee (2010) taking into consideration, for the first time, the over time changes on the duration of schooling cycles, in each country and for each age group. This approach can significantly improve the measurement of inequality in education by producing estimates of the Gini Index of Education more realistic and reliable especially when it comes to international comparisons. We made a decomposition of the overall educational inequality to measure the contribution of each component. The results show that (i) even though educational inequality has been declining for most countries during the last six decades, it is not occurring in a uniform manner because it depends on age group, gender and development level for each country or region. (ii) The data indicate the existence of the Education Kuznets Curve when we consider the standard deviation of schooling. (iii) It also suggests that the average years of schooling and the Gini index of education are negatively related.