points. These results are consistent with the framework, as poorer children may estimate lower benefits from continued enrollment, and face relatively higher direct and opportunity costs particularly at the secondary level.

Access to public education services reflects these same differences.<sup>12</sup> As shown in Figure 9, of all individuals enrolled in primary public schools, a majority live in households at the bottom of the income distribution. Between 12 and 17 percent of public primary students are from households in the first decile, while only 6 percent or fewer are from the richest 10 percent of households. These results would suggest that, in general, primary services are progressive, benefitting the poor more than the rest. Along the same lines, public LS services could be characterized as focusing on the poor and middle classes, since the shares of students living in households in deciles 1 to 7 are somewhat similar, while fewer than 6 percent of those enrolled belong to households in the richest decile. In contrast, US services appear to be regressive, since the proportion benefitting from these services generally increases along the income distribution up to decile 9. Extreme cases are Nicaragua and Honduras, where the proportion of students enrolled in public US services is three times larger in decile 9 compared to decile 1. In Costa Rica and El Salvador, where the differentials are less pronounced, the proportion of all US public students that belong to the poorest and richest households, respectively, is practically the same. The role of access in dropout will be discussed further in Section 3 below.

# **1.6 Net coverage rates and overage**

The previous discussion described school participation based on which levels individuals would be expected to be enrolled in at each age. Figure 10 summarizes the data on “net coverage” rates from the most recent household surveys, which refer to the proportion of individuals actually enrolled at the level that corresponds to their age, according to the structure of each country’s education system. In general, these rates are quite high in primary, but decline at LS and especially at US. For US, the highest rate is observed in Panama, where 53 percent of youth in the 15-17 age group is actually enrolled at this level. In Honduras and Guatemala, only 27 and 20 percent of this age group, respectively, are enrolled in US.

These results reveal that there are considerable numbers of US age youth in Central America who are still enrolled in school but overage, and not enrolled at the US level as would be expected. This is illustrated in Figure 11, were each country is compared to the average of Latin America, where at US age, 24 percent are already out of the schooling system, 6 percent are still attending primary, 37 percent are attending LS, and only 33 percent are actually attending US as expected. The only country in Central America with better indicators is Costa Rica, where overall enrollment is higher: only 17 percent are out of school, and the proportion of US age individuals actually attending the expected level is 40 percent—7 points above the Latin America average. Panama shows a similar rate of overage as the Latin America average, but has lower proportions out of school and enrolled in US. El Salvador shows a different picture. In this case, overage is lower (at 26 percent) and enrollment in US is higher (37 percent), but the proportion out of school (38 percent) is significantly above the Latin America average. Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua show a

> 12 Data for Panama is not presented here, since the household survey does not allow identifying whether attendance is in public or private schools.

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