Education and inequality: an international perspective

In this paper, we summarise the existing literature and present new empirical evidence in order to address the questions of whether educational expansion is an effective tool for reducing inequality and whether some educational systems have better associations with lower inequality and others worse. We argue that – depending on the form the policies take, on the extent of intergenerational correlations in income and on the levers of educational access – policies that aim at increasing education are not necessarily beneficial in the sense of reducing inequality. Differential impacts of different systems by gender are particularly striking.