The educational attainment of the world's population : three decades of progress

This paper, which analyzes the educational achievement of the adult populations in 74 countries based on 1980 census data, employs several indicators to provide standardized measures of each country's human capital stock or the human resources available for economic growth and development. The first section focuses on regional and gender differences in the proportion of the population without any education. It finds that substantial gains in schooling have been made since the 1940s, although the gap between men and women, though diminishing, persists throughout most of the world today. The second section examines average levels of schooling of the world's population and emphasizes the substantial progress that was made by women between the 1940s and 1970s. The third section presents the proportion of the adult population that has obtained a complete primary school education and suggests that universal primary education is still a distant goal for many countries. The final section compares regional and gender differences in the primary school completion rate, a measure of internal efficiency. While developing countries have achieved some improvements on this measure, persistently low levels of primary school efficiency continue to plague education sectors.