Resumen de Public education spending: efficiency, productivity and politics
The numerous benefits arising from education have become a consensual issue among scholars and policy-makers. Education has been recognized as a key factor of economic growth and development; and also of democracy, social mobility and individual fulfillment. The strength of these advantages has reached the political discourses, which have often seen education upgrading as a crucial development goal. However, this widespread agreement becomes hazy when it comes to the decisions about the allocation of public resources. Then, macroeconomic and technical objectives, pressures of social elites or political interests of governing parties seem to end up shaping policy choices.
This dissertation examines public education spending and educational outcomes across countries and over time. Its three chapters explore different aspects of the topic and delve into questions like: how (and why) public resources are translated into valued educational outputs? Why do some countries obtain more benefits from education spending than others? What drives policy makers to prioritize education spending? Hence, a first study on the efficiency of public education outlays provides empirical evidence about its evolution and determinant factors. It argues that in low spending settings the mere efficiency increase would not be enough to lead to better educational outcomes. The second chapter performs an evaluation of the productivity impacts of higher education focusing on the structure of education spending among levels and on the skill profile of tertiary students. The analysis shows that the benefits from higher education are conditioned by the range of fiscal resources it captures at the expense of primary schooling and the share of students trained at the fields of mathematics, physics and life sciences. Finally, the last chapter adopts an economic history perspective. It analyses whether the extent of the government fiscal commitment to expand primary education in Uruguay has been explained by the interests of tactically motivated politicians. It concludes that, when distributing basic education funds, the ruling party weighted its political strengths across the country regions.
All chapters pay special attention to the performance of Latin American countries (LACs). The first two chapters examine upper-middle LACs in the context of a set of developed and developing economies for the period 1970-2010. In turn, the last chapter focuses on the case of Uruguay during the first half of the 20th century.
