The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement

By Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2010

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An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit institutional variation that does not exist within countries; draw on much larger variation than usually available within any country; reveal whether any result is country-specific or more general; test whether effects are systematically heterogeneous in different settings; circumvent selection issues that plague within-country identification by using system-level aggregated measures; and uncover general-equilibrium effects that often elude studies in a single country. The advantages come at the price of concerns about the limited number of country observations, the cross-sectional character of most available achievement data, and possible bias from unobserved country factors like culture. This chapter reviews the economic literature on international differences in educational achievement, restricting itself to comparative analyses that are not possible within single countries and placing particular emphasis on studies trying to address key issues of empirical identification. While quantitative input measures show little impact, several measures of institutional structures and of the quality of the teaching force can account for significant portions of the large international differences in the level and equity of student achievement. Variations in skills measured by the international tests are in turn strongly related to individual labor-market outcomes and, perhaps more importantly, to cross-country variations in economic growth.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence. Working Papers Series. SAN11-01. (2011, neutral): “In particular, cross-country studies estimated at both the country level and the student level find strong associations between students' socioeconomic backgrounds and their educational achievement (Hanushek & Woessman, 2010, p. 16 and Table 6).”
The economic impacts of learning losses (2020, positive): “Substantial learning differences across countries, closely related to institutional structures of their school systems, indicate that improvements are possible ( (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2011[21]); (Woessmann, 2016[22])).”
The more, the better? The impact of instructional time on student performance (2017, neutral): “Contrary to international comparisons and their limitations (see e.g. Hanushek and Woessmann 2011 or Goldstein 2004) the use of only one country has © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Stefan C. Wolter stefan.wolter@vwi.unibe.ch Supplemental data for this article…”
General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle* (2011, neutral): “For an overview of economic studies using the IALS data, see Section V in Hanushek and Woessmann (2011).”
Teaching Practices and Social Capital (2013, neutral): “11 education production function (see Woessman (2005) for an analysis based on TIMSS, and Hanushek and Woessmann (2010) for a synthesis).”
Will more higher education improve economic growth (2016, positive): “In fact, Figure 1 shows the annual increase in the percentage of the population aged 25–34 with tertiary schooling over 2000–14 across OECD countries. The OECD average has increased by more than 1 percentage point per year for the last decade and a half. Korea, Luxemburg, and Poland have each expand”
Economic growth in developing countries: The role of human capital (2013, neutral): “However, the lack of relationship across countries in the amount spent on schools and the observed test scores that has been generally found provides evidence against this (Hanushek and Woessmann (2011a)).”