Jun

21

A tale of two graphs

June 21, 2007 | 5 Comments | Joshua Gans

Here is the graph that drives the broadband. Look at Australia there at No.17 in the OECD. This graph has attracted massive political attention and billions of dollars of promises.

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This next graph — also of OECD countries — comes courtesy of Andrew Leigh. It is expenditure on pre-primary education as a percent of GDP. The figures at 2002 but the ranking is unchanged. (This represents spending of about $1 billion per annum.)

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In early childhood education, we are the bottom of the OECD. Ranked dead last. The political attention is similarly lower. For instance, Labor have promised $450m to fund 15 hours a week of pre-school education for 4 year olds. Over 5 years this comes to less than half its broadband spending promise but is a very large increase over what is currently spent overall (and is a big boost to the public contribution). Yet, it is absent from the real attentive debate.

There has been lots written about early childhood intervention and, for the big bang stuff, I agree with Andrew Leigh that randomised trials are desperately needed to work out what we need to do. But, when Australia lags so badly in something like this, the relative lack of attention is very worrying. This is one area that I hope can get some ‘catch-up’ politics attention from the government soon.


Comments

5 Responses to “A tale of two graphs”

  1. Jeremy on June 21st, 2007 1:45 pm

    Meh. You’ve rightly criticised people taking OECD rankings seriously when it comes to broadband. Exactly the same applies to these rankings. Who cares where we rank?

    (Also, the link doesn’t show Andrew’s methodology – or anything much really – but I really wonder how he got each jurisdiction’s data to fit a common definition of ‘early childhood education’. And obviously the data tells us nothing about effectiveness or the sort of targeting Andrew champions.)

  2. Joshua Gans on June 21st, 2007 2:22 pm

    As I understand it, the data is directly from the OECD. Yep, there could be methodological issues. Nonetheless, there would have to be some big errors for this to be systematically wrong.

  3. David on June 21st, 2007 2:24 pm

    Also, which studies have shown that the dollars spent actually make a difference. Is the amount spent per child – especially the very young pre-school children – any big deal?
    Isn’t pre-primary education the parent’s responsibility? Or should we just hand the kids over at birth to ensure we keep up with OECD rankings?

  4. Jeremy on June 21st, 2007 3:42 pm

    I looked up the OECD sources. There’s a useful country by country commentary in the ‘Starting Strong II’ report. There are some really obvious possible confounders. The most obvious one is age for starting primary school: SEVEN in Hungary and Denmark; six in Norway, France, Mexico, Belgium. The significance of this is that education of five year-olds is mostly pre-primary in those countries, but is mostly primary in Australia. So, obviously, Australia should urgently look into keeping all our five-year olds in kindergarten for an extra year to boost our OECD rankings for pre-primary spending. (And maybe we can do something to lower our GDP too.)

    It’s also worth mentioning that the table Andrew relies upon is a table summarising educational spending at all levels. From perusing the notes, it seems clear that pre-primary spending, a miniscule proportion of spending in all countries, was given less attention by the statisticians than the other sorts of spending. The figures are clearly very approximate, with 9 countries of the 24 sitting (complacently, I guess) on the average. The ‘Starting Strong II’ figures are more nuanced, showing Australia much closer to the middle countries and way ahead of Canada (who don’t even make it into Andrew’s table. Maybe they start primary at 4?)

    A couple of other things to note: Andrew’s table is actually for ‘expenditure on educational institutions’, which includes expenditure on government education departments. One has to wonder whether Victoria’s DHS (which administers all pre-primary education) was even counted. Also, it covers both private and public expenditure, so it’s not clear what this means for government spending policy.

    In short, Andrew’s table tells us squat.

  5. Chris lloyd on June 26th, 2007 2:41 pm

    Local communities can easily fund kinda’s themselves, through fees. So government expenditure does not represent national expenditure – especially for purposes of cross country comparisons.