Ludger Woessmann Profile picture
Oct 17 15 tweets 25 min read
🚨At least ⅔ ‼️ of the world’s youth do not reach even basic skill levels

That’s the bottom line of our new paper:

“Global Universal Basic Skills:
Current Deficits and Implications for World Development”
w/ @sarages & @EricHanushek

Out @ NBER: nber.org/papers/w30566
A🧵1/10
Ensuring that all of the world’s youth have at least basic skills is a prime development goal by itself,

but reaching such a goal also has immense importance for inclusive & sustainable world development.

See @UN‘s @SDGoals #4: ensure quality education for all 2/10
This paper addresses 2 intertwined questions:
1⃣How far is the world away from ensuring that every child obtains the basic skills needed to be internationally competitive?
2⃣What would accomplishing this mean for world development?
[ungated version: sites.google.com/view/woessmann…] 3/10
Based on the micro data of international & regional achievement tests,
we develop a new method to map achievement onto a common scale.

We then estimate the share of children not achieving basic skills for 159 countries that cover 98% of world population & 99% of world GDP. 4/10
Available skill data at 5 layers of decreasing reliability
1⃣PISA
2⃣TIMSS
3⃣regional tests: TERCE, SACMEQ, PASEC
4⃣sub-territorial PISA participation (India & China)
5⃣no international participation
5/10
Method to depict skills on a common global scale
1⃣Define basic skills: PISA Level 1
2⃣Transform other achievement tests onto PISA scale
3⃣India & China on a global scale
4⃣Impute achievement in countries w/o int’l test participation
5⃣Skill levels of children not in school
6/10
👉6 stylized facts on world distribution of basic skills:

1⃣At least ⅔ of the world’s youth do not obtain basic skills.

2⃣Share of children not reaching basic skills exceeds half in 101 countries & rises above 90% in 36 of these countries. 7/10
3⃣Even in high-income countries, ¼ of children lacks basic skills.

4⃣Skill deficits reach 94% in Sub-Saharan Africa & 89% in South Asia but also hit 68% in Middle East/North Africa & 65% in Latin America. 8/10
5⃣Skill gaps most apparent for ⅓ of global youth not attending secondary school, but fully 62% of world’s secondary-school STUDENTS fail to reach basic skills.

6⃣½ of world’s youth live in 35 countries that fail to participate in int’l tests, lack reliable information. 9/10
We use skill measures to quantify economic gains from every child achieving at least basic skills:

Present value of lost world economic output due to missing goal of global universal basic skills amounts to
> $700 trillion over remaining century or
11% of discounted GDP. 10/10

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More from @Woessmann

Oct 10
📢Paper out in @EFPJournal

“Long-run Trends in the U.S. SES-Achievement Gap”
w/ @EricHanushek @jlight_ @Paul_E_Peterson+L. Talpey

👉Against current conventional wisdom, we find that the SES-achievement gap has FALLEN modestly over past 4 decades.

doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a…
A🧵1/5
Rising US inequality raises concerns about potentially widening gaps in educational achievement between children raised within families of high + low socio-economic status (SES).
2/5 Image
We use all tests that are psychometrically linked over time: LTT-NAEP, Main-NAEP, TIMSS + PISA.
Using individual data for over 1.5 million students, we construct an index of SES based on parental education + home possessions for 93 separate test-subject-age-year observations. 3/5 Image
Read 9 tweets
Jan 18
📢New WP🚨
“Income Contingency and the Electorate’s Support for Tuition”
w/ Philipp @lergetporer

👉Experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases public support for tuition by 18 (!) perc. points.

A 🧵
1/7
👇
cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_… Image
Paper shows that electorate’s preferences for using tuition to finance higher education🧑‍🎓strongly depend on design of payment scheme.
Deferred income-contingent scheme (🇦🇺🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇳🇿): payments are due only after graduation and must be paid only if income exceeds certain threshold.
2/7
Income-contingent financing has attractive efficiency & equity properties. @dynarski
Optimal dynamic tax theory: income contingency provides incentives for human capital accumulation while insuring against income risk. @S_Stantcheva @SebastianFind @Dominik__Sachs
3/7
Read 9 tweets
Mar 16, 2021
Just accepted at @EconomicaLSE:

“Does Ignorance of Economic Returns and Costs Explain the Educational Aspiration Gap?
Representative Evidence from Adults and Adolescents”
w/ P. @lergetporer & K. Werner

A thread (1/6)

(Spoiler: it’s “no”)

drive.google.com/file/d/1ET6GGo… Image
In our representative German survey, 74% of university graduates, but only 36% of those w/o a univ degree favor a univ degree for their children.

Similarly, aspiration gap of 24 pp. between adolescents w/ and w/o univ-educated parents. (2/6) ImageImage
Can lack of information on returns & costs of univ among persons w/o univ background explain these aspiration gaps?

Experimental information provision indeed raises aspirations.

But treatment effects are at least as strong for those w/ univ background as for those w/o. (3/6)
Read 8 tweets

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