by the World Bank have data on the most commonly reported indicator on education: government education spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) (Figure 1). Also, of the 124 countries that reported this information in 2000, only 75 reported the same information in 2015. This limited coverage stands in stark contrast to the data available for the health sector. Since 2000, 186 countries have compiled detailed health-financing data each year. We also found discrepancies between statistics provided by UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the estimated value of countries’ public education spending as a share of GDP, with the IMF’s numbers averaging 0.7 percentage point higher. Similarly, we found an average 0.8 percentage point difference between UIS data for this measure and those reported in the World Bank’s public expenditure reviews (PERs), since 2013 (Figure 1).<sup>2</sup>

# **Box 1: Indicator Definitions and Sources**<sup>**a**</sup>

We primarily used data from UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics (UIS) to document country-level changes in education spending between 1999 and 2015 (Table 1). Where there were gaps in the UIS database, we used data from the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Government Finance Statistics (GFS) database, with these comprising about 12 percent of all observations. We used data from the same sources to break down spending by level of education (primary, secondary, and tertiary).<sup>b</sup> Our data on overall government spending and GDP came from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI), supplemented by data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).<sup>c</sup>

|**Indicator**|**Source**|
|---|---|
|1. Government expenditure on education (2015 purchasing power parity [PPP] dollars)|UIS & IMF|
|2. Government education expenditure as a percentage of GDP|UIS & IMF|
|3. Government education expenditure as a percentage of total government expenditure|UIS & IMF|
|4. Education level (primary, secondary, tertiary) share of government education expenditure|UIS & IMF|
|5. Government education expenditure per student and by education level (2015 PPP dollars)|UIS & IMF|
|6. Government expenditure as a percentage of GDP|WDI|
|7. GDP in 2011 constant PPP dollars|WDI|

## a. Online databases were accessed in November 2018.

b. While UIS collects data on the functional classification of government education spending worldwide, we chose not to use them because establishing patterns and trends is difficult given the relatively low coverage of these indicators across countries.

c. Annex Table A1 presents the averages and numbers of observations for each of these variables in each year. A full description of data sources for each variable and the approach to the statistics reported in the paper are available <u>from the authors on request.</u> These gaps in data coverage and quality presented challenges for our analysis. With regard to trends in public education spending across all countries and for groups of countries (for example, classified by income or region), the difference in average spending from one year to the next is a function of actual changes in spending at the country level but also of the number of countries reporting each year. For example, average public spending on education for all countries dropped from 4.7 percent of GDP in 2003 to 4.4 percent of GDP in 2004. However, a large share of this drop resulted from the exclusion of several countries with higher-than-average spending which had reported in 2003 but did not in 2004. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to address issues of data quality, we had to find ways to surmount these

> 2 We also found that related indicators are frequently inconsistent. For example, the raw data on public education spending as a percentage of GDP are often not the same as the figure we get if we multiplied together a country’s public education spending as a percentage of government expenditure and government expenditure as a percentage of GDP. On average, there was a discrepancy of 55 percent between these two estimates of public education spending as a share of GDP.

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