Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence



Pressure to reduce public sector spending as a whole increases, with serious consequences for social
sector and education spending since this is one of the largest single budgetary items in many countries.

Reallocation of expenditure within the education sector to favour salary recurrent expenditure at the
expense of non-salary recurrent and capital spending occurs in both planned and unplanned ways.

Reallocation between educational levels (primary, secondary, tertiary) takes place for reasons of
budgetary expediency as much as a rational response to planned needs and developmental benefits.

Concentration of government support on formal rather than non-formal educational spending increases.

Emphasis grows on cost reducing: reforms, which act to reduce the unit costs per child, and is reflected
in increased pupil teacher ratios and declining salaries.

Greater stress is placed on cost recovery schemes and more private financing to reduce public
expenditure on education.

Short term considerations and budgetary constraints are overemphasised at the expense of medium and
long term concerns in decision making.:

The dimensions of these different but inter-related possible outcomes have been explored in some detail in
Lewin (1987:54-87). As might be expected, evidence that one or more of these tendencies has
accompanied economic austerity programmes is not difficult to find for specific countries over a particular
time scale. Thus, as is reported above, the vulnerability of educational spending in some countries has
been high (Noss 1991:24). Capital expenditure has declined in many of the poorest developing countries
with an increasing amount financed by donors; non-salary recurrent expenditure has also declined, often to
derisory levels (Lewin with Berstecher 1989:60). Higher education appears to have been relatively
protected in some cases - in Costa Rica between 1980 and 1986 primary allocations fell to 65% of their
1980 value and those for higher education to only 90% (Noss 1991:28). Data on non-formal expenditures
by governments are notoriously difficult to obtain. There are however very few examples where ministries
of education under financial stress appear have explicitly increased their commitment in this area. Salary
levels of teachers have fallen widely, especially in Africa (Tibi 1990). Cost recovery schemes, which
include the levying of fees, voluntary contributions and encouragement of private schooling are
widespread with many consequences for equity (Lewin with Berstecher 1989:63-71). And "cultures of
cuts" in public sector organisations, with the various symptoms of crisis management, are not unrelated to
the emergence of good government as a development priority in many countries as administrative capacity
decays.

Charting the mechanisms through which such changes come about is far more difficult than demonstrating
the existence of trends in particular countries which are consistent with the propositions. This is because
many factors will be specific to the social and economic conditions of each country, and the impact of
adjustment programmes will depend on the nature of the adjustment that is planned, and the details of how



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