Determinants of Educational Inequalities a Macroeconomic Approach on Panel Data

Macroeconomic research on inequalities in education focuses mainly on the possible impacts of this form of inequality on a number of economic and social variables such as growth, income inequality, health, etc. The determinants of this form of inequality remain little explored. The purpose of this paper is to explain educational inequalities through a macroeconomic approach by estimating a fixed-effects model for a panel of developing countries observed over the period 1980–2014. The model-dependent variable is the Gini index of the average number of years of study of the population aged 15 and over. The results indicate a strong negative correlation between inequalities in education and two educational variables namely the literacy rate of the population aged 15 and over and the percentage of primary school students enrolled in private school. They also indicate a strong negative correlation between the dependent variable and the following socio-economic variables: per capita income and urbanization. The model indicates that public spending on education does not have a significant impact on educational inequalities. The latter are also not sensitive to poverty, income inequality, employment in industry and trade openness.