The Performance of the Global Economy in meeting the Education Sustainable Development Goals: Through the lens of the Indian and South Asian Economies

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused a global education crisis. Most education systems in the world have been severely affected by education disruptions and have faced unprecedented challenges. School closures brought on by the pandemic have had devastating consequences for children’s learning and well-being. It is estimated that 147 million children missed more than half of their in-class instruction over the past two years. This generation of children could lose a combined total of $17 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value. School closures have affected girls, children from disadvantaged backgrounds, those living in rural areas, children with disabilities, and children from ethnic minorities more than their peers.

The proportion of young people completing upper secondary school increased from 54 percent in 2015 to 58 percent in 2020, with completion slowing down relative to progress in the preceding five-year period. It is too early to predict the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on completion. Early indications from low-income countries based on phone surveys point to a small decline in attendance upon a return to school but a larger increase in repetition, which may increase dropout rates in coming years.

Data from 73 (mostly low- and middle-income) countries for the period of 2013-2021, indicate that about 7 in 10 children 3 and 4 years of age are developmentally on track, with no significant differences by child’s sex.?

The participation rate in organized learning one year before the official primary entry age rose steadily in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, from 69 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in 2020 but with considerable variation between countries (with the rate ranging from a figure as low as 13 percent to nearly 100 percent). This progress is being threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, as schoolchildren in early childhood education and the early grades, especially from low- and middle-income countries, are the most affected by education disruption. In most countries, early education facilities and schools were partially or fully closed for more than a full school year.

Insufficient skills are often mentioned as an impediment to effective information and communications technology use. Based on data for 2017-2020, in only 10 percent of countries could more than 70 percent of individuals carry out one of the activities that compose basic skills in the last three months such as sending an email with an attachment. In only 15 percent of countries, more than 40 percent of people have standard skills such as creating an electronic presentation using presentation software.

Despite improvements, disparities in educational participation and outcomes are persistent. Gender inequalities remain for many indicators. For example, most countries with data have not achieved gender parity in the proportion of children meeting minimum learning proficiency standards in reading, and in the lower secondary completion rate. For the lower secondary completion rate, only one-sixth of countries with data had parity between rural and urban areas and almost no countries achieved parity between children of the richest households and children of the poorest.

Basic school infrastructure is far from universal. In 2020, approximately one-quarter of primary schools globally did not have access to basic services such as electricity, drinking water, and basic sanitation facilities. Figures are substantially lower for other facilities such as information and communications technology and disability-adapted infrastructure, with about 50 percent of primary schools having such access. Shares among least developed countries tend to be substantially lower, ranging from approximately one-half to two-thirds of the global average. During the global pandemic, schools in comparatively disadvantaged areas were less equipped to keep children and staff safe.?

In 2020, there were about 12 million pre-primary school teachers, 33 million primary school teachers, and 38 million secondary school teachers working in classrooms around the world, and 83 percent of primary and secondary school teachers were trained.

South Asia has experienced significant progress in improving human development over the past few decades. With sustained income growth and strong policy efforts, the region, which accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population, has contributed to more than 200 million people exiting poverty in the course of the last three decades (Goretti and others 2019). Nonetheless, some South Asian countries' human capital index is lower than what their GDP per capita would predict. And South Asia, on average, still lags behind East Asia and the Pacific as well as Latin America and the Caribbean in access to key infrastructure such as electricity, water, sanitation, and telecommunication (Jha and Arao 2018).?

Within the region, India has become a global economic powerhouse with enormous development potential ahead. Unlocking this potential requires investments in human and physical capital. In this regard, India has made astonishing progress along several dimensions. Hundreds of millions have lifted themselves out of poverty over the past decades. Education enrollment is now nearly universal for primary school.

Nonetheless, to further capitalize on economic growth, India should continue to close gaps in human and physical capital—gaps that have recently widened as a result of the pandemic. Indeed, after years of steady progress, during the COVID-19 pandemic health and education systems have been disrupted, poverty has increased, and the prevalence of undernourishment has risen (Food and Agriculture Organization 2021; UN 2021).

In the past few decades, all countries in South Asia have improved their education outcomes. Since the 1980s, the adult literacy rate has doubled or tripled in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. At present, Sri Lanka and Maldives have literacy rates above 90 percent, whereas other countries lag the world’s average.

India’s growth into an emerging market economy has been accompanied by increased levels of education. The share of literacy among all adults increased from 41 percent in 1981 to 74 percent in 2018. The economic gains of past decades have gone hand in hand with better education service delivery, including through the reduction in the student–teacher ratio at the primary level. Still, nearly 45 percent of the population has education only at or below the primary level (National Statistics Office, 2019). While the expansion in the participation of youth in higher grade levels is welcome, it has put pressure on service delivery at the secondary and especially tertiary levels, resulting in rises in the student-teacher ratio.

Despite progress, educational outcomes in most South Asian countries lag emerging economy peers. South Asian countries span a wide spectrum of educational performance. Only Maldives and Sri Lanka are close to attaining an SDG4 index of 100 and well exceed the emerging economy median of 87.4 At the same time, two countries—Pakistan and Afghanistan—even fall short of the low-income developing countries' median index of 54. India’s value at 80.2 falls short of the median index for emerging economies, which is likely related to the relatively large class sizes as well as gaps in preprimary and tertiary enrollment. The student–teacher ratio is higher than in Brazil and China, and the enrollment ratio for the population ages 3–23 years is also below that of Brazil and China. India’s own goal is to achieve a 100 percent adjusted net enrollment for grades 1–10 by 2030 (Government of India, NITI Aayog 2018).

Education expenditures (as a percent of GDP), E, can be expressed as an identity:

where w refers to teachers’ annual wages as a ratio to GDP per capita, STR is the student–teacher ratio, e signifies the enrollment rate (that is, the number of students as a percentage of the student-age population), SAP indicates the student age population as a percent of the total population, and Eother pertains to all education spending besides the teacher wage bill as a percent of total expenditures in education. Total education expenditure is therefore a function of the teachers’ wage bill (that is, wages times the supply of teachers) divided by the share of the wage bill in total education spending. The supply of teachers, in turn, is derived as the number of students (enrollment rate times the student-age population) divided by the student–teacher ratio.

The spending needed in 2030 in India to perform well in the education SDG derived by taking into account India’s projected demographics (student-age population) in 2030 and today’s levels of the education cost drivers of the high-performing countries among India’s peers. These cost drivers include teachers’ wages, the student–teacher ratio, the enrollment rate, and education spending other than the teacher wage bill as a share of total education spending.?

India can achieve better education outcomes by 2030 without increasing the share of GDP devoted to education expenditures. As the student-age population is expected to shrink, India can increase the spending per student even if expenditures as a percentage of GDP decline. Education spending in 2030 as a share of GDP at 4.1 percent (lower than the current expenditures of 5.6 percent) would allow spending per student to increase by 37 percent by 2030—to an annual $674 per student from the current level of $491. Such expansion in spending per student might require a larger share of the public sector in education, as private spending contributes 27 percent of overall spending—compared with peer countries with a strong sectoral record, with only 5 percent reliance on private spending. While there is no need to spend more on education relative to GDP, India needs to spend more efficiently. Reallocation of resources by reducing wage growth toward bringing on board more teachers will support higher enrollment and reduce class size. The student-per-teacher ratio is 16.5 in countries with strong education outcomes compared with 27 in India today. As strong economic growth continues, teachers’ wages would have to increase at a slower pace than GDP per capita. India’s teachers’ wages are three times its GDP per capita, which is distinctly higher than teachers’ wages in high-performing countries among India’s peers which are less than twice the GDP per capita. More effort also needs to be exerted to reduce absenteeism of those teachers already employed if resources are to be used efficiently, for example, through more systematic monitoring— using both top-down (for example, through surprise inspections) and bottom-up (through active parent–teacher associations) mechanisms (Muralidharan and others 2017). Beyond countrywide levels, the geographic and socio-cultural distribution of educational opportunities requires greater attention. The SDG4 India Index across states/union territories ranges widely, from 36 to 87 (Government of India, NITI Aayog 2018). Discrepancies also prevail across social groups. For example, scheduled tribes’ gross enrollment rate in higher education is 10 points lower than the overall average (Government of India, Ministry of Finance 2019). Important progress by the government needs to be acknowledged in bringing about gender equity in enrollment. Gross enrollment rates are higher for girls than boys at all levels other than higher education (Government of India, Ministry of Finance 2019). Being attentive to these distributional concerns will both improve the targeting of spending for more efficient achievement of India-wide goals, as well as address crucial concerns of equity.

Spending needed for the education SDGs is distinctly lower in India than elsewhere in South Asia. On average, South Asian countries’ additional costs to meet the education SDG is about 2 percent of GDP, with some countries facing additional costs of more than three times this average. This is higher than for India—which has a lower spending requirement in terms of GDP in 2030 than its current spending—and for the average emerging economy.?

To conclude, I would like to put forward my interpretation that cost estimates for reaching the SDGs have increased because of progress being set back by the pandemic. For instance, school closures have resulted in children falling behind in learning, especially since homeschooling cannot be done effectively in particular by households lacking skills, means, or time. In India, for example, an estimated 320 million children have been affected by pandemic-induced school closures (Sahni, 2020). This has significantly increased the costs to achieve the Education Sustainable Development Goals.