We study the rural-urban divide in educational attainment in a cross-country setting. In order to do this, we present a newly constructed cross-country data set measuring average educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 56 countries. This data set is used to study the sources of variation in (i) rural educational attainment, (ii) urban educational attainment, and (iii) the national disparities between rural and urban educational attainment. The empirical exercise is guided by human capital, labour market and migration theories and employs economic, demographic, political, cultural, geographic, and infrastructural explanatory variables. By employing general-to-specific and specific-to-general modelling approaches, we conclude that labour markets, the role of agriculture and credit constraint factors are all important in explaining cross-country variation in rural and urban educational attainment. We also find evidence that the level of development moderates the impact of factors affecting regional educational attainment, in particular credit constraint factors. We subject our results to a number of tests and find them to be robust.
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Paper provided by Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance in its series Economics Series with number
2005_01.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General O18 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Regional, Urban, and Rural Analyses R12 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
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