The Benefits of a Better Education System: What Cross-Country Data Can Tell Us

Previous cross-country analyses of the factors that affect education outcomes have focused on measures of school inputs such as average pupil-teacher ratios, teacher characteristics, and availability of learning materials. The capacity of the education system to translate these inputs into education outcomes has not been researched in the same way because internationally comparable measures of the quality of the system have not been available. Assessing the quality of an education system is an immense task, but efforts have been made to construct a unique database with information on the quality of the education system in a large number of countries. This paper uses that database to examine how indicators of system quality are associated with measures of learning that are approximately comparable across countries, as well as with average years of schooling and people’s view of their education system. The paper estimates these relationship controlling for the level of educaton expenditure and per-capita GDP across countries. Although measures of the quality of the education system can be improved significantly, the findings indicate that better education systems do yield better education outcomes.