This research documents long-run trends in between-country education inequality and proposes a method for doing so that accounts for the ways in which most education variables differ from continuous variables such as income. Historical, national-level estimates of primary schooling enrollment rates and years of completed primary, secondary, and total schooling are used to identify several problems that arise when formal measures of inequality are used to estimate intercountry education convergence, including violation of the welfare, scale invariance, and anonymity principles. An alternate measurement strategy shows that the intercountry trend in the dispersion of education has followed an approximately normal curve over the past 140 years, but with considerable variation across measures of education. These results are in contradiction to previous education inequality studies, which have reported either monotonically rising or falling intercountry inequality.
AdlerN. E.NewmanK.2002. “Socioeconomic Disparities in Health: Pathways and Policies.” Health Affairs21(2):60-76.
2.
AllisonPaul. 1978. “Measures of Inequality.” American Sociological Review43:865-80.
3.
BakerDavidLeTendreGerald. 2005. National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
4.
BarroRobert J.LeeJong-Wha. 2000. “International Data on Educational Attainment: Updates and Implications.” Center for International Development Working Paper No. 42. Cambridge, MA: Center for International Development.
5.
BarroRobert J.LeeJong-Wha. 2010. “A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010.” NBER Working Paper No. 15902. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
6.
BeckfieldJason. 2003. “Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International Organization.” American Sociological Review68(2):401-24.
7.
BenavotAaronRiddlePhyllis. 1988. “The Expansion of Primary Education, 1870–1940: Trends and Issues.” Sociology of Education61(3):191-210.
8.
BenavotAaronChaYun-KyungKamensDavidMeyerJohn W.WongSuk-Ying. 1991. “Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Curricula, 1920-1986.” American Sociological Review56(1):85-100.
9.
BradleyKarenRamirezFrancisco O.1996. “World Polity and Gender Parity: Women’s Share of Higher Education, 1965-1985.” Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization11(1):63-91.
10.
CardDavid. 1999. “The Causal Effects of Education on Earnings.” Pp. 1801-63 in Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 3, edited by AshenfelterO.CardD.New York: Elsevier Science.
11.
CippolaC. M.1969. Literacy and Development in the West. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
12.
CohenDanielSotoMarcello. 2007. “Growth and Human Capital: Good Data, Good Results.” Journal of Economic Growth12(1):51-76.
13.
CorniaGiovanni AndreaMenchiniLeonardo. 2006. “Health Improvements and Health Inequality during the Last 40 Years.” UNU-WIDER Research Paper. Helsinki, Finland: United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.
14.
CraftsNicholas. 2002. “The Human Development Index, 1870–1999: Some Revised Estimates.” European Review of Economic History6(3):395-405.
15.
DeatonAngus. 2007. “Global Patterns of Income and Health: Facts, Interpretations, and Policies.” UNU-WIDER Annual Lecture 10. Helsinki, Finland: United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research.
16.
DoriusShawn. 2008. “Global Demographic Convergence? A Reconsideration of Changing Intercountry Inequality in Fertility.” Population and Development Review34(3):519–37.
17.
EasterlinRichard A.1981. “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?” Journal of Economic History4(1):1–19.
18.
FirebaughGlenn. 2003. The New Geography of Global Income Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
19.
GoeslingBrianBakerDavid P.2008. “Three Faces of International Inequality.” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility26(2):183-98.
20.
HoutMichael. 1984. “Status, Autonomy, and Training in Occupational Mobility.” American Journal of Sociology89(6):1379-1409.
21.
HoutMichael. 1988. “More Universalism, Less Structural Mobility: The American Occupation Structure in the 1980s.” American Journal of Sociology93(6):1358-1400.
22.
KendallM.G.YuleG.U.1968. An introduction to the theory of statistics (14th ed.). New York: Hafner.
23.
KennyCharles. 2005. “Why Are We Worried about Income? Nearly Everything That Matters Is Converging.” World Development33(1):1-19.
LongJ. A.IchovicsJ. R.GillT. M.HorwitzR. J.2001. “The Cumulative Effects of Social Class on Mental Status Decline.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society49(7):1005-1007.
26.
MaddisonAngus. 2004. The World Economy: Historical Statistics. Paris, France: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
27.
MeltonJames Van Horn. 1988. Absolutism and the eighteenth-century origins of compulsory schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28.
MeyerJohn W.RamirezFrancisco O.RubinsonRichardBoli-BennettJohn. 1977. “The World Education Revolution, 1950-1970.” Sociology of Education4:242-58.
29.
MeyerJohn W.RamirezFrancisco O.SoysalYasemin. 1992. “World Expansion of Mass Education, 1870-1980.” Sociology of Education65(2):128-49.
30.
MiechRichardPampelFredKimJinyoungRogersRichard G.2011. “The Enduring Association between Education and Mortality: The Role of Widening and Narrowing Disparities.” American Sociological Review76(6):913-34.
31.
MitchellBrian R.2003a. International Historical Statistics: Africa, Asia and Oceania, 1750-2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
32.
MitchellBrian R.2003b. International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750-2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
33.
MitchellBrian R.2003c. International Historical Statistics: The Americas, 1750-2000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
34.
MorrissonC.MurtinF.2009. “The Century of Education.” Journal of Human Capital3(1):1-42.
35.
MulliganCasey B.Sala-i-MartinXavier. 1993. “Transitional Dynamics in Two-sector Models of Endogenous Growth.” Quarterly Journal of Economics108(3):739-73.
36.
NelsonR. R.PhelpsE. S. “Investment in Humans, Technological Diffusion, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review56(2):67-75.
37.
NeumayerEric. 2004. “HIV/AIDS and Cross-National Convergence in Life Expectancy.” Population and Development Review30:727-742.
38.
RamRati. 1990. “Educational Expansion and Schooling Inequality: International Evidence and Some Implications.” Review of Economics and Statistics72(2):266-74.
39.
RamirezFrancisco O.MeyerJohn W. 1980. “The Social Construction of the Modern World System.” Annual Review of Sociology6:369-99.
40.
RamirezFrancisco O.SoysalYaseminShanahanSuzanne.1997. “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-national Acquisition of Women’s Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990.” American Sociological Review62(5):735-45.
41.
RossC. E.WuC.1995. “The Links between Education and Health.” American Sociological Review60(5):719-45.
42.
RossC. E.WuC.1996. “Education, Age, and the Cumulative Advantage in Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior37(1):104-20.
43.
SahnDavid E.YoungerStepen D. 2007. “Decomposing World Education Inequality.” Cornell Food and Nutrition Policy Program No. 187. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.
44.
Sala-i-MartinXavier X.1996. “The Classical Approach to Convergence Analysis.” Economic Journal106(437):1019-36.
45.
SutcliffeBob. 2004. “World Inequality and Globalization.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy20(1):15-37.
46.
ThomasVinodWangYanFanXibo. 2000. “Measuring Education Inequality: Gini Coefficients of Education.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. WPS2525. Washington, DC: World Bank.
47.
ThorntonArland. 2005. Reading History Sideways. The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of Developmental Paradigm on Family Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
48.
TolbertPamela S.ZuckerLynne G.1983 “Institutional Sources of Change in the Formal Structure of Organizations: The Diffusion of Civil Service Reform, 1880-1935.” Administrative Science Quarterly28(1):22-39.
49.
United Nations. 2009. World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. New York: United Nations.
50.
United Nations. 2009. Demographic Yearbook. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
51.
World Bank. 2009. World Development Indicators 2009. Washington, DC: World Bank.
