Measuring Education Inequalities: Concentration and Dispersion-Based Approach. Lessons from Kuznets Curve in MENA Region

Although the quantity of education is widely used to measure the economical and social performances of educative systems, only a few works have addressed the issue of equity in education. In this work, we have calculated two measures of inequality in education based on Barro and Lee's (2010) data: the Gini index of education and the standard deviation of schooling. The sample comprises 15 countries from the MENA region over the period 1950-2010. We used hierarchical clustering to control for the heterogeneity of the sample and identify the existence of cluster of similar value. We applied the Kuznets curve of education over the countries of the region. The findings show a decline in the Gini index within all the participating countries, for men and women and also for all age groups. The results also indicate that the education distribution was more unequal in the middle-income countries than in the higher-income countries in 2010, although they had almost the same level in 1970. The results suggested that the shape of the Kuznets curve depends basically on the measure used to approximate the inequality. Indeed, the Kuznets hypothesis is emphasized once we use the standard deviation of schooling. The Gini index, for its part, has maintained a significant negative relationship within the average number of years of the study.