Big BRICs, Weak Foundations: The Beginning of Public Elementary Education in Brazil, Russia, India, and China / Latika Chaudhary, Aldo Musacchio, Steven Nafziger, Se Yan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chaudhary, Latika.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Musacchio, Aldo.

Nafziger, Steven.

Yan, Se.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17852.

NBER working paper series no. w17852

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012.

Summary:

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2012.