Global Dynamics of Gini Coefficients of Education for 146 Countries: Update to 1950-2015 and a Compact Guide to the Literature

Abstract

We briefly survey the literature which uses data for Gini coefficients of education. We update the Gini coefficients of education to include the year 2015, added to the Barro-Lee data set recently, and compare them to those of the earlier data set based on older Barro-Lee data. A panel analysis shows that every five years education inequality falls by 2.8 percentage points. A stable average value is predicted to be 0.22. Kernel density world distributions for education Ginis loose their twin peaks when going from 1955 to later years, and the right tail of the distribution with high inequality is losing mass over time.