Our aim is to better understand the views of senior policy makers in low- and middle-income countries on education. We surveyed policy makers from 12 low- and middle-income countries, including Bangladesh, DRC, Ghana, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Vietnam. These countries were selected to represent a range of sizes, geographies, and income levels, with a range of political systems and educational outcomes. For comparisons between EAP and non-EAP countries in our sample, we note that living standards are lower on average in the non-EAP countries than in the EAP group. Sampled EAP countries’ per capita GDP ranges from 8,200 to 12,000 $,<sup>3</sup> while the nonEAP countries range from PPP 1,100 to 12,000 $PPP. This means that Peru is the only non-EAP country with a similar level of income, so we use a robustness check with per capita GDP in PPP when comparing EAP and non-EAP countries.

The sampling approach was driven by a desire to: (i) have a representative sample of senior civil servants, requiring random sampling; and (ii) compare attitudes of officials across different countries, requiring a large number of respondents per country. Within each country we sample up to three different populations, with some variation according to individual countries:

1. Ministry of Education Senior officials - defined as all staff of the level of Deputy or Assistant Directors and above)

2. Ministry of Finance Senior Officials 3. Members of Parliament Within each ministry of education and finance, the respondents were stratified into tiers by seniority prior to randomized selection. The precise numbers vary somewhat by ministry, as some have smaller total numbers in some of these tiers. The survey questions, results, and further notes on methodology are available at the address mentioned above.

This survey has a number of important limitations. Respondents were told that the survey was supported by CGD and the World Bank as part of the interview protocol. This may have influenced their responses, for example by saying what they expected the international community would want to hear. In addition, there is some inconsistency in the reported views, such as believing that additional spending on education may be ineffective, but reporting wanting additional spending nonetheless. An additional limitation is that some questions were ambiguous, for example including complex constructs such as “implementation capacity” without clearly defining them, due to survey time constraints. Even with these potential biases, we think the results are interesting, informative, and potentially helpful to understand the views of policy makers on education, and we hope future surveys can overcome some of these limitations.

- 3 Access to Education, Student Learning and Government Capacity

- 3.1 Officials in EAP tend to prioritize improvements in school completion over improvements in learning.

Officials were asked “For the economy to grow faster, the most important thing your country could do in education would be to: a) increase the number of students finishing secondary school; b) improve the test scores of children already in school; and c) don’t know/other/no answer." A majority of officials in

> 3 Living standards are compared by converting nominal GDP in local currency to an international measure, purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for the fact that the price of products is different across countries.

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