The core explanatory factors common to all studies—income, parental education, urban location—echo those usually found to be important determinants of schooling attainment and performance in developing countries. The examination of 35 developing countries by Filmer and Pritchett (1999), for example, finds that “household wealth is strongly related to educational attainment of children nearly everywhere”. The multicountry analysis in Hanushek and Luque (2003) finds that parental education and family asset ownership are as important in explaining children’s test scores in developing countries, on average, as they are in developed countries. And in country-level studies, there are many examples of similar findings. To take just a few, Tansel (1997) finds that in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, parental education, household consumption, and urban location all predict greater educational attainment, and Tansel (1998) finds the same results for Turkey.

# **4.2. Macro factors**

The literature on tutoring has cited several factors as likely drivers of the demand for private tutoring on a macro (economy-wide) level. First, the transition to a market economy has substantially increased the amounts of private tutoring (supplied and demanded) in countries where it did not exist earlier – China, Vietnam, some African countries, and many Eastern European countries in the former Soviet bloc (Bray, 1999a). Second, it has been argued that tight linkages between education and work are argued to result in intense competition for more education, and thus private tutoring (Stevenson and Baker, 1992). An extreme form of these linkages is what is called the “diploma disease” (Dore, 1976)—whereby modern bureaucratic organizations may use a person’s degree as an initial screening tool for employment, regardless of whether the person receives the intrinsic education skills symbolized by the degree. This phenomenon has arguably fueled the demand for private tutoring in a number of countries.<sup>12</sup> Third, a deficient public education system may make parents resort to using private tutoring to compensate for poor quality (Kim and Lee, 2004). Low pay levels and weak monitoring of teachers in the public system can also cause teachers to force tutoring on students (Buchmann, 1999; Silova and Bray, 2006a), as formalized in a theoretical model by Biswal (1999).<sup>13</sup> Fourth, it has been argued that cultural values may explain why private tutoring is more prevalent in some countries, notably in East Asia (Bray, 1999a).

However, little formal empirical research has been done to test these hypotheses. The only crosscountry study that has looked at the macro factors determining the use of private tutoring is Baker et al. (2001). Using data for 41 countries participating in the 3<sup>rd</sup> TIMSS international student assessment, that paper finds that higher public education expenditures (as a share of GNP) and gross enrollment rates predict lower use of private tutoring, but that a high-stakes testing system has no significant impact on private tutoring. The former result suggests that private tutoring is more popular in countries with weak and deficient public education systems. The analysis does not control for per7