people and planet

14
INEQUALITY MEASURES
Measuring inequality in education is critical, but is
challenging because of three main factors. First, inequality
can be examined with reference to any education indicator,
such as the primary completion rate or the number of
years of education attained (Morrisson and Murtin, 2013;
Meschi and Scervini, 2014). The increasing availability of
national and international learning achievement surveys
further enables the measurement of inequality in learning
outcome indicators (OECD, 2010; Fereira and Gignoux,
2014). An important difference is between education
indicators that are delimited between 0% and 100% and
those that are not. For example, inequality would be
zero if 100% of all students pass a minimum learning
proficiency level but high in terms of the score in the
same assessment.
implications depending on whether a country is small or
large, or whether it is sparsely or densely populated.
Household wealth levels are also difficult to compare.
Household surveys such as the Demographic and Health
Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys
(MICS) have popularized asset indices (based, for
example, on house construction materials or ownership
of consumer durables) as a proxy measure of household
socio-economic status in low and middle income
countries. However, asset indices are not comparable
between countries and over time (Rutstein and Staveteig,
2014). Television ownership does not have the same
implication in a European country as an African one, or in
2000 vs 2010. Each asset index is specific to the country
and the year. Its value is in comparing relative rather
than absolute wealth levels.
Second, different inequality measures can be used to see
how an education indicator is distributed in the population,
each with advantages and disadvantages. Some measures
have solid conceptual foundations and can be linked better
to social perceptions of justice and equity. Others are
less rigorous but can be easily communicated. Different
inequality measures can also lead to different conclusions
about the degree of inequality and the extent to which it
changes over time (Box 14.1).
Third, policy-makers need to know how an education
indicator varies by learner characteristics. The usual
comparable markers of potential disadvantage are
gender, location, and income or wealth. There is
insufficient information
for comparisons to be
made for other important
There is insufficient
characteristics, such as
information on disability. On other critical
important markers markers, comparisons can
be made within but not
of disadvantage,
between countries. For
such as disability example, being a member
of an ethnic, linguistic
or religious group can
be a marker of education advantage or disadvantage,
depending on the country.
Issues arise even among more comparable
characteristics. For example, regarding location, national
definitions of rural and urban areas vary across countries.
Some surveys, moreover, may not use the national
definitions. In addition, the definitions have different
PARITY INDEX
The Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators
has proposed the parity index as the global measure
of inequality in education. This is the ratio between
the values of two groups and ranges from 0 (extreme
inequality at the expense of one group) to 1 (parity) to
infinity (extreme inequality at the expense of the other
group). For example, if 30% of the poorest and 60% of the
richest have completed primary school, then the value of
the wealth parity index of the primary completion rate
is 0.5. This measure has been proposed because it is the
easiest to communicate to a broad audience and has
been effective for describing gender disparity over the
past two decades.
New analysis for this report estimates average parity
index values by region and country income group for
several education indicators and three individual-level
characteristics. The data refer to 2008–2014 and cover
82 low and middle income countries, which represent
over 90% of the population in the two combined groups.
Information is also provided on disparity in completion
rates in high income countries.
In the case of children who have ever been to school,
there is gender parity for middle income countries, but
disparity at the expense of girls in low income countries,
where 93 girls for every 100 boys have ever been to
school (Figure 14.2a). Disparity in having been to school
is exacerbated when location and wealth are used as
markers. In low income countries, disparity is at the
expense of children in rural areas, with the location parity
2016 • GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 257