Global Trends in Education Inequality: 1950–2010

We document trends in global education inequality and its between and within-country components using absolute, intermediate and relative inequality measures. Existing studies have relied on converting categorical variables into continuous ones to estimate levels of inequality. Such procedures might not capture recent expansions in the duration of educational programmes. We therefore compiled a database of 1164 datasets with information on years of education from a large set of countries across the world. According to our results, the absolute, intermediate and relative perspectives generate inconsistent narratives about recent trends in education inequality. While relative global inequality and its within- and between-country components have fallen monotonically during the last decades, absolute and intermediate inequality measures of actual years of education suggest that there might be a recent upsurge in global education inequality. Irrespective of the notion of inequality we adhere to, the bulk of global education inequality is explained more and more by variations within countries, with between-country inequality gradually losing ground as a source of variation. These findings suggest that the forces of globalisation are rendering countries increasingly similar among them, and that whether global education inequality actually increments or decrements increasingly depends on what happens within those countries.