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Middle East: Middle East Education Profile

2012/08/15

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Middle East Education Profile

Human capital is considered an important determinant of economic growth and an effective vehicle for reducing inequality and absolute poverty. When countries invest in human capital through education, there is the potential for generating benefits to society that go beyond those acquired by the individuals involved. Available evidence suggests that education is associated with lower fertility rates, healthier and bet¬ter-educated children, and stronger national identity. Not surprisingly, most developing countries, including those in the MENA region, have committed substantial resources over the last 40 years to expand and im¬prove their education systems. Attaining the above benefits from investing in human capital through education is not automatic, however.

All too often, higher investment in education is not associated with faster economic growth, especially when the system fails to produce the level, mix, and quality of skilled labor re¬quired to meet demand or when demand itself is inadequate or distorted. Similarly, poor-quality education effectively erodes its returns, leading to high dropout rates, especially among the poor. Finally, rather than en¬hancing social cohesion, improving health outcomes, and strengthening the future development capacity of a nation, education is sometimes used by vested interest groups to advance particular causes at the expense of the broader public good. In light of the uncertainty surrounding the outcomes of investment in education, Part I of this report—The Case for Education Reform in the MENA Region—explores the extent to which MENA countries have been successful in their effort at making education work for development.

More concretely, chapter 1 documents MENA’s investment in human capital through education over the past 40 years or so, and shows how this investment has affected education outcomes. Chapter 2 explores the extent to which investment in education has been translated into higher economic growth, improved income equality, and lower poverty in the region. Chapter 3 analyzes the state of readiness of the education systems in the region to deal with such new challenges as globalization and the knowledge economy, demographic pressure, and fi¬nance of education.

The upshot of the analysis is that MENA countries have committed more resources to education than other developing countries at a similar level of per capita income. As a result, the region was able to improve ac¬cess to education at all levels of instruction for boys and girls at rates not previously seen in the developing world. The main shortcoming of past efforts lies in the weak link between the improvements in the level, qual¬ity, and distribution of human capital and economic growth, income dis¬tribution, and poverty reduction. Past investments in education have not generated the maximum benefits to individuals and society.

Thus, the case for education reform is compelling. This case is further reinforced by the lack of readiness of most education systems in the region to deal with globalization and the increasing emphasis on knowledge in the de¬velopment process, the region’s enormous youth bulge, and the addi¬tional financial resources required to expand higher levels of instruction, having essentially achieved full enrollment at the primary level.

How much have MENA countries invested in human capital through education over the past four decades? What has been the impact of this investment on the level, quality, and distribution of human capital? What has been the impact on such human indicators as fertility and infant mor¬tality rates as well as life expectancy? How well did the region perform in accumulating human capital compared with other developing coun¬tries?

The value of reviewing how much or how little countries in the re¬gion have invested in human capital through education is that it docu¬ments progress made to date. It also situates the region relative to other developing countries, especially in a world of increasing capital mobility. In addition, the review sets the stage for exploring the relationship among human capital and economic growth, income distribution, and poverty reduction in chapter
This chapter is organized into four sections: the first three examine investment in education under three facets of human capital: its level, its quality, and its distribution. The fourth section is devoted to noneco¬nomic returns. Although all of these facets of human capital are related to each other, as will be noted occasionally, they are addressed separately for the sake of clarity.

Investment in Education and the Level of Human Capital

A number of measures are effective in gauging a country’s effort to in¬crease the level of human capital through education, including public spending,1 enrollment rates, and the number of years of schooling. A his¬torical and comparative assessment of the effort made by MENA coun¬tries along these dimensions is presented in the following paragraphs.

Public Sector Spending on Education

The MENA region does well on spending on education as a proportion of GDP compared to East Asia and Latin America (table 1.1). In the pe¬riod 1965–2003, MENA governments spent an average of approximately 5 percent of their GDP on education, whereas our sample of East Asian and Latin American countries spent closer to 3 percent. In recent years, the proportion of GDP spent by MENA governments as a whole ex¬ceeded those of East Asia and Latin America by about 1.5 percentage points.


In terms of public expenditure per pupil, MENA countries also spend on average more per student at all levels of education than do our sam¬ple of comparator countries. This observation is supported by the figures presented in table 1.2, which are reported in 2000 dollars after adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP) to reflect differences in the price of a basket of consumption goods across countries.

These figures confirm the strong collective effort to invest in educa¬tion in the MENA region. However, they also reveal that most MENA countries are placing more public effort per pupil into secondary than into primary education and, to a greater extent, into tertiary than into secondary education.3 This pattern of spending favors children in fami¬lies of higher social class, who are likely to send their children to univer¬sity. Conversely, if most of the spending were allocated to primary schooling, this would imply greater investment in a broader portion of the population.

Enrollment rates

The large amount of spending on education as a percent of GDP in the MENA region has successfully increased enrollment. Indeed, net enroll¬ment rates, measured as the percentage of number of pupils enrolled who are of the official age group for a given level of education in that age group, improved significantly over time. If the current level of effort is sustained, the region can catch up with other regions in the near future. More concretely, the majority of MENA counties were able to achieve almost universal enrollment in primary education and even completion of fifth grade as a percentage of the age cohort.

Similar progress has been made with respect to the proportion of the age cohort attending secondary school and university. The data pre¬sented in table 1.4 indicate that the MENA region was able to increase Enrollment at the secondary school level by almost threefold between 1970 and 2003; the number was approximately fivefold at the level of Public Expenditure per Student by Level of Education and Ratio of Expenditure for Secondary/Primary and Tertiary/Primary, 2000 higher education.4 Despite this impressive progress, the average level of education among the population is still lower in MENA than in the com¬parator areas. Admittedly, the region started from a lower base than that found in the countries in East Asia and Latin America. But the fact re¬mains that the average gross enrollment rate in secondary schools in MENA in 2003 was 75 percent, compared to 78 and 90 percent for East Asia and Latin America, respectively.

Similarly, the average gross enrollment rate in higher education in MENA was only 26.0 percent in 2003, which is about two-thirds of the average for the other two regions. These differences indicate that the level of human capital in MENA is still rel¬atively low.


Moreover, there seems to be a big difference in the path taken by the MENA region in expanding the average level of education among the population compared with the approaches used in East Asia and Latin America. In MENA, expansion was not always through progressive uni¬versalization of primary schooling, followed by secondary and then higher education. Nor was it often in response to growing demand and the emergence of new and dynamic sectors. In the Arab Republic of Egypt, for example, the expansion of secondary and higher education was ahead of full enrollment at the lower levels of education. In the ma¬jority of MENA countries, expansion took place without a correspon¬ding increase in new job opportunities in the more dynamic sectors of the economy.

The combination of free education at the secondary and higher  and a policy of guaranteed employment in the public sector has had neg¬ative side effects: a demand for higher education that does not corre¬spond to real economic needs and a lowering of demand for technical ed¬ucation because of the nontechnical nature of guaranteed jobs in government.


In contrast to the pattern of expansion observed in the MENA region, the growth of secondary and especially higher education in East Asia, ex¬cept for the Philippines, has primarily been in response to new and dy¬namic industrial-sector needs in terms of skilled labor. For example, in China, since 2001, university enrollment has been expanded to nearly 20 percent of the age cohort, following a long period of high growth. Sim¬ilarly, the Republic of Korea’s higher education system did not begin to grow until after almost 15 years of rapid economic growth, and it was mainly supported with private funding.


In Latin America, the expansion of education has had some connec¬tion to the demand for labor. In the 1980s, secondary and higher educa¬tion expanded rapidly, despite the debt crisis, economic recession, and relatively high unemployment. Enrollment at both levels continued to increase in the 1990s, a period of much higher growth. Within Latin America, the expansion of secondary and higher education was in re¬sponse to demand in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, but was far ahead of economic needs in other countries, such as Peru. In fact, in Brazil and Mexico, university expansion seems to be lagging behind eco¬nomic needs (Carnoy 2001).

Years of Schooling in the Adult Population

Increased enrollment is expected to increase the average years of school¬ing over time. By this measure, which is frequently used in growth re¬gressions as a proxy for investment in human capital, the data show that between 1960 and 2000, the average number of years of education in the adult population (15 years old and over) in the MENA region grew more rapidly than in other regions of the world (see table 1.5). However, by 2000, the region averaged 5.4 years of school attainment, compared to 7.3 and 7.2 years for East Asia and Latin America, respectively. The main problem for MENA countries, then, is not the growth of the average years of schooling; rather, it is the extremely low initial level of education in most countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, in 1960, Jordan’s adult population had an average of only 2.33 years of schooling, which is lower than the level in every East Asian and Latin American country on our list except Indonesia. By 2000, Jordan’s population had higher average education levels (6.91 years) than In¬donesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, and Brazil—most of which had started in 1960 with higher levels of education than Jordan. The gap be¬tween other MENA countries for which we have data and East Asia and Latin America has also been reduced. Even so, the average level of edu¬cation in MENA in 2000 is still less than it is in East Asia and Latin America by more than one full year.

The number of years of schooling is a popular but inaccurate measure of human capital investment, however, because it assumes that the qual¬ity of each year of schooling in each country is the same. It assumes that most countries teach approximately the same academic skills in various grades of primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary schools. These assumptions clearly do not hold, and need to be corrected by one meas¬ure of quality or another; this is the subject we turn to next.

Investment in Education and the Quality of Human Capital

Measuring the quality of education is illusive, and can only be approxi¬mated by using different indicators. In this section, three such indicators are used: scores on international tests, fields of study in higher education, and literacy rates. Imperfect as these indicators may be, they provide a rea¬sonable “weight” that can be attached to the number of years of schooling in the labor force as an improved measure of human capital investment.

Quality of Secondary Education

A large number of countries in the MENA region, in East Asia, and in Latin America have now participated in one or more international tests of eighth graders (Trends in International Math and Science Study— TIMSS) or 15-year-olds (Programme for International Student Assess-ment—PISA). The results on these tests capture the relative amount of language and math learned by those who are reaching the end of lower secondary school.

Table 1.6 shows the average math scores for 21 countries in the MENA, East Asian, and Latin American regions.5 The results indicate that the average of 401 for the MENA region is modestly below that of Latin American countries (406) but significantly below that of East Asia (466). More broadly, the MENA region scores below the international average of 489,6 let alone the top performing country, Singapore, whose average score for TIMSS 1995, 1999, and 2003 is 617.
Within the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Lebanon, and Jordan score above the regional average, while Saudi Arabia and Morocco are below the average.

Usually, test scores are adjusted by GDP per capita and gross enroll¬ment rates in secondary schools to take into account the possible effect of higher social class on student performance. Higher GDP/capita is typically associated with a higher average level of family education and resources, and lower gross enrollment rates in secondary school indicate that the education system is more elitist and selective, thus probably con¬tributing to higher test scores. Thus, we would expect to find a positive relationship between test scores and GDP/capita and a negative rela¬tionship between test scores and gross enrollment rates.


We estimate such an equation, using the indicators provided in table 1.6 and leaving out the three Gulf States (Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) because their very high GDP per capita and low scores are not representative of the typical relationship between these two variables.

The estimated equation is as follows:


The figures in parentheses are the t-values, showing that the esti¬mated coefficient for GDP/capita is significant at the 1 percent level, and the coefficient for gross secondary enrollment is not significantly differ¬ent from zero, although it has the expected negative sign. Using this equation, we can predict the test score each country should have if the students do as well as those in other countries of the world that have the same GDP/capita and gross secondary enrollment rates. Table 1.7 ranks the 18 countries in our sample by test score, then uses equation (1) to estimate the predicted value of the test score based on the country’s values of the two independent variables. The difference be¬tween the actual and the predicted value is the “residual,” or the unex¬plained part of the test score. A positive residual indicates that students in that country do better than GDP/capita and gross enrollment would predict; a negative score indicates the opposite.


It is interesting to note that when we adjust for their GDP/capita and gross secondary enrollment rates, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt move down the rank order relative to their rank order in the absolute score. Morocco moves up the rank order. Iran and Tunisia remain essentially at about the level predicted. If the test scores reflect the quality of educa¬tion systems, as opposed to some other socioeconomic variables we have not accounted for, this implies that MENA’s education systems may be functioning satisfactorily in some countries given their level of economic development, whereas those in other countries fall below this average. In that sense, at the lower secondary level at least, the quality of human cap¬ital in some of the MENA countries may also be acceptable.


If we include the three Gulf States for which we have test score data— Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia—this picture changes. The estimated regression line of test scores on GDP/capita and gross secondary enroll¬ment is essentially flat, and the coefficients of GDP/capita and gross sec¬ondary enrollment are not significantly different from zero. One reason for this is that the very high GDP/capita in the three oil states reflects wealth per inhabitant, but it is not the kind of wealth based on higher ed¬ucation and social capital associated with children’s higher academic per¬formance in school. Even after a generation of high income from petro¬leum exports, apparently the academic level in these countries remains low.

Field of Study by Higher Education Students

The proportion of enrollment in university in science and engineering versus humanities and social sciences could be viewed as another index of the “quality” of human capital at the level of higher education. The underlying assumption here is that scientists and engineers are likely to contribute more to economic growth than are social scientists and stu¬dents of humanity because of the increasing importance of technological innovation and adaptation in the development process.7 If this assump-tion holds, it is instructive to look at the data in table 1.8, which indicate that MENA countries have a high percentage of their university students studying humanities and social sciences. In more than half of the MENA countries, about two-thirds of the students major in those fields. This pattern of enrollment is the opposite of what we observe in East Asia and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America.

Illiteracy Rates

A third dimension of the quality of human capital is literacy rates among the adult population. By this measure, table 1.9 indicates that, despite the rapid growth of enrollment in primary schools in MENA in the past 20 years, a high fraction of the adult population (one in five adults in 2003) is still illiterate. The level of illiteracy in the adult population, especially among women, sharply distinguishes most MENA countries from most Latin American and East Asian societies. In two countries—Morocco and Yemen—about one-half the population remains illiterate. The total number of illiterates in MENA countries (54 million) represents about 1.5 percent of all the illiterate adults in the world. The 36 million illiter¬ate women in MENA also represent about 2.2 percent of all illiterate women in the world Female illiteracy has come down in the MENA region over time, and the rate of change has been rapid and steady. However, given the large gaps that persist between MENA and other comparators, full conver¬gence is still a long way off. Whereas average female illiteracy rates are 30 percent for the MENA region, they are as low as 9 and 12 percent among comparator countries in Latin America and East Asia, respectively. As for the literacy gap between men and women, there is clear evidence of rapid equalization over time. While the ratio of literate females to literate males was only 0.60 in 1980, it had risen to almost 0.83 by 2003. Once again, the rate of progress was faster in MENA than among its comparators.


Several factors account for the gender gap in the MENA region. One factor is social, as the enrollment of boys in schools was historically fa¬vored over that of girls. Adult males may also have more learning oppor¬tunities to become literate in the workplace. In addition, because women tend to live longer than men, at any given time there are more women who grew up in times of low school coverage in the oldest age cohorts. However, most of the MENA countries have significantly reduced their illiteracy rate since 1980. This in turn has reduced the absolute difference between men and women from 26 percent to 15 percent. The problem of high female illiteracy will gradually be reduced in the MENA region thanks to increasing universal primary education for girls. Nevertheless, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Yemen still have a long way to go in reducing female illiteracy.

Investment in Education and the Distribution of Human Capital

While enrollment and quality of education may increase, access to edu¬cation can remain limited to high-income groups, to those who live in urban areas, or to boys at the expense of girls. This would lead to un¬ equal distribution of human capital, eroding its potential as a mechanism for reducing poverty and enhancing economic growth. The issue ad¬dressed in this section is whether or not the region’s education strategies favored a more egalitarian distribution of human capital over time. The answer is ambiguous at best; inclusion policies may have diminished over time while gender parity efforts proved effective.

Inclusion Policies

In addition to the high level of public spending and the expansion of en¬rollment, wide access to education has been assured in most MENA countries through a policy of free education for all that was enacted mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. This policy was generally applied at all levels of education, from basic to tertiary. Education was considered by many countries as a right; this was especially true in the Maghreb coun¬tries, Egypt and Syria. As a result of these policies, the region had achieved more equality in the distribution of education in 1970 than had our sample of countries from East Asia and Latin America. As shown in table 1.10, the data indicate that the standard deviation from the mean of years of education in the adult population (15 years of age or older) was only 3.4 in the MENA region, whereas the corresponding standard de¬viations for Latin America and East Asia were 3.64 and 3.77, respec¬tively.9 Between 1985 and 2000, however, both the MENA and non-MENA countries exhibited rising standard deviations from the mean of years of schooling in the adult population. Yet this trend was so strong in the MENA region that the average dispersion of education became more skewed than in the other two regions.


Increasing education inequality in MENA is further supported by ad¬ditional data on the percentage of enrollment by poor versus nonpoor and rural versus urban populations in primary and secondary education for a sample of countries. The data, shown in table 1.11, are derived from household surveys in the second half of the 1990s. These data are avail¬able for only six MENA countries and over time only for Egypt and Mo¬rocco. Nevertheless, they reveal that, despite good intentions, the non-poor and students who live in urban areas tend to have higher access to education at both levels than the poor and those who live in rural areas. The only exceptions are Algeria and Iran, where the data show almost equal access by both groups across geographical locations for primary education.
Why did MENA countries move from a situation of somewhat equal distribution of education to a situation in which distribution has become more skewed over time? The answer can be traced to a number of fac¬tors, some of which are structural in nature while others are policy driven. On the former front, standard deviations from the mean tend to increase over time as countries expand their educational systems because, as the average level of education increases from low levels, dispersion in¬creases. Subsequently, as the average level of education reaches into upper secondary school, the dispersion levels off and eventually declines as a ceiling effect (i.e., university graduate education) cuts off the upper end of the distribution. Because MENA countries started from a lower level of school attainment and a more equitable distribution of educa¬tional attainment than countries in other regions, such a trend was al¬most inevitable. On the policy front, it has already been noted that the region allocated higher expenditures per pupil in secondary relative to basic education compared to East Asia and Latin America.


Some countries, like Egypt, also opted to expand secondary and high education before full enrollment in primary schools was completed, al¬though this practice was an exception. Both policy decisions would have provided more benefit to families in higher social classes than to those at the bottom.
In addition to the factors described above, the region has increasingly relied on the private sector for the provision of education at different lev¬els (table 1.12). While this trend may increase the inequity in the distri¬bution of education, the outcome depends on the strategy adopted by government, especially in terms of the level of education left to the pri¬vate sector and the nature of public funding. A strategy that relies on the private sector for the provision of education at higher levels with govern¬ment commitment to providing basic education is likely to be more egal¬itarian than one that allows greater private sector involvement in basic ed¬ucation relative to higher education. Similarly, a strategy that commits public funding to poor students, even if they enroll in private schools, is likely to be more egalitarian than one that leaves full funding to house¬holds irrespective of their ability to pay. On both counts, the MENA re¬gion’s strategy fares less well than the strategy adopted by the East Asian countries and, to a lesser extent, by the Latin American countries.


More concretely, the information provided in table 1.12 indicates that the MENA countries have allowed greater private participation in the provision of education at all levels over time, whereas other regions de¬creased their share of private education enrollment in secondary educa¬tion. For basic education, the average enrollment rate increased from  The above pattern stands in sharp contrast to that of East Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. East Asia has essentially privatized higher levels of schooling and left primary education almost entirely in the pub¬lic hands. The pattern of enrollment in private schools in 2003 was 8.2 percent in primary schools, 22.8 percent in secondary schools, and 52.5 percent in higher education. Except in China and Malaysia, a significant fraction of the cost of higher education in East Asia is borne by families. A similar pattern holds for Latin America, although with lower public commitment to primary education than in East Asia. Thus, from both regions, countries like Korea, China, Brazil, and Chile have significantly privatized their higher education systems, either by limiting space at free public universities so that expansion has to take place in fee-charging pri¬vate universities (as in Korea and Brazil) or by charging high fees at pub¬lic universities (as in Chile and China).11 In that sense, private education is used as a strategy to mobilize private resources and also to socially stratify educational access.

Gender Parity

Notwithstanding some growing inequality in the distribution of human capital in general, as noted above, the MENA region has made remarkable progress in the last 30 years with respect to closing the gen¬der gap in education. Progress has been steady and rapid, covering all levels of education. As shown in tables 1.13 and 1.14, gender parity for basic education is almost complete. Although the region started with rel¬atively low levels of gender parity, the parity indices for secondary and higher education are not significantly different from the corresponding indices for Latin America and East Asia. The area where more progress is still needed is in relation to illiteracy, which remains significant among the female adult population, as discussed in the section on education quality.
Progress has not been even across all counties, however. With respect to primary education, Djibouti and Yemen have yet to close the gender gap. At the level of secondary education, although few countries have at¬tained full secondary enrollment, almost all have attained gender parity. than they are for secondary education in most MENA countries. In fact, only in Djibouti, Iraq, and Yemen does the proportion of male students significantly surpass that of females. In Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and West Bank and Gaza, female students out¬number male students. Most countries achieved gender parity during the 1990s.

In addition to the immediate impact of investment in education on human capital accumulation, this investment also has the potential of contributing to lower fertility and infant mortality rates and longer life expectancy. Such outcomes were observed in other developing counties, especially as education spread among females. Given that MENA coun¬tries have also significantly improved their gender parity over the last few decades, we should observe similar trends in the region as well. The data presented below support this prediction.


As shown in figure 1.1, MENA countries started from very high fer¬tility and infant mortality rates and very low life expectancy in 1960 in relation to our comparator countries from East Asia and Latin America. By 2004, the MENA region had caught up with the average life ex¬pectancy of East Asia and Latin America and had brought infant mortal¬ity rates to levels very close to those of these regions. While fertility rates in MENA are still higher than in the other regions, the average number of children per woman in the region declined from seven in 1960 to three in 2004. Progress in MENA was remarkable; it outpaced the rate of progress elsewhere.
Within the region, however, significant variations remain. For exam¬ple, Yemen, Djibouti, and Oman still have fertility rates of greater than four, compared with a fertility rate of two in Lebanon, Algeria, and Kuwait. Similarly, life expectancy is only 53 years in Djibouti and 61 years in Yemen, compared with 79 in Tunisia and 75 in Bahrain. Never¬theless, in all of the MENA countries, these indicators have improved over time.

Summing Up

The countries of the MENA region got off to a late start in investing in human capital through formal schooling, but once they began, they gen¬erally spent a relatively high percentage of their GDP on education and raised the average level of schooling in their populations relatively rap¬idly. At present, almost all countries in the region educate their boys and girls at the primary level, and a significant percentage of the relevant age cohorts are engaged in secondary and tertiary education. Literacy rates have been reduced significantly and some countries score relatively well on international tests, especially when the level of income and gross en¬rollment rates are taken into account. Moreover, most countries of the region were able to achieve gender parity at almost all levels of educa¬tion, and to improve fertility and infant mortality rates as well as life ex¬pectancy.
Notwithstanding this impressive track record, the region lags behind East Asia and to some extent Latin America in terms of the level, qual¬ity, and even distribution of human capital. The average number of years of schooling in MENA is below both regions by more than one year.


The rapid expansion of secondary and higher education was accommo¬dated by employment in the public sector at relatively high wages rather than by increased demand for higher educated labor by a dynamic pri¬vate sector. In addition, the pattern of public expenditure is biased in favor of students at higher levels of education compared with other re¬gions, which reflects a bias in favor of the socially privileged class.

On the quality of human capital, literacy rates in the region are still low. The problem is especially acute in Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt. In addition, because of the very low levels of initial enrollment of women, female illiteracy is even higher. The lagging investment in the education of women may have kept fertility rates from falling as soon historically and as rapidly as in other regions of the world. The picture is somewhat better when quality is assessed on the basis of the academic performance of eighth- and ninth-grade students on international tests. The results rank Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, and Tunisia at the high end, and Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Kuwait at the low end of the test score range. When adjusted to take into account GDP per capita and gross en¬rollment rates, Lebanon and Jordan do as well as some of the higher scoring East Asian countries. Even then, however, the scores are much lower in math than, for example, those in Korea or Malaysia. Thus, labor in the MENA region does not have the same human capital as Malaysia or Korea.


As for the distribution of human capital, it has become worse over time in MENA when education equality is measured by the standard de¬viation of the years of schooling. Starting from a relatively equal distri¬bution in the 1960s and 1970s, the standard deviation of the mean years of schooling is now higher in the region than it is in East Asia or Latin America. Surely more and more children are enrolled in schools in the region and the Gini coefficient is declining in MENA and elsewhere, as will be discussed below, but the relative educational attainment between them has widened. Meanwhile, the allocation of public expenditures seems to favor higher education, and the increasing reliance on the pri¬vate sector is pursued without a clear strategy as to the level of education left to the private sector or as to how poor students may access private schools.


These generalizations clearly do not apply equally to all countries in the MENA region, which is rather heterogeneous in the degree to which countries have invested in human capital and in their investment strate¬gies. Syria, for example, has invested much less in human capital than, say, Jordan. Morocco seems to spend much more on its secondary edu¬cation students relative to primary education students than its neighbor Algeria. Given their very high average income per capita, the oil states, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, all seem to provide, on aver¬ age, lower quality education than most other MENA countries. These differences influence the role of human capital in achieving economic growth and the distribution of its benefits in each country. Nevertheless, the region on the whole also exhibits a number of similarities. These in¬clude high levels of commitment to investment in education and gender parity, and frequently a policy of guaranteed employment in govern¬ment. The question we take up next is how much past investments in ed¬ucation have contributed to economic growth, better income distribu¬tion, and lower poverty in the region.