This paper provides empirical evidence on students' achievements determinants in Sub-Saharan Africa based on a sample of 26602 students from the ten countries that participated in the PASEC 2014 assessment. By using a two-level hierarchical linear model, I find that learning inequalities are primarily explained by differences in schools'…

Creativity is the driving force of technological innovation and sustainable economic growth in the knowledge society. A central question, therefore, is how education helps to enhance creativity. As East Asian countries occupy the top of performance tests such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is most important…

International organisations facilitated the spread of competency-based reforms around the world. Accepting at face value correlations between students' performance on international assessments, such as PISA, and nations' economic development, reformers in different countries began to adopt competency-based standards to improve the quality of…

This article examines global changes in tracking policies over the post-World War II period. Using a newly constructed quantitative panel data set of 139 countries from 1960 to 2010, I show that a majority of countries around the world have shifted away from sharply tracked institutions at the junior secondary level toward more formally…

PISA test data from 2000 to today have shown Germany's education system is one of the most inequitable within the OECD, with high correlations between student background and achievement outcomes. Scholars have identified the highly differentiated school structure, which tracks students as young as 10 years old, as a central cause. This scholarship…

In the past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data. The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the…