Comparing Sri Lankan Government Expenditure on Education with Global Statistics
Education is one of the most debated topics today in Sri Lanka. It has been constantly raised by various parties that government is not spending enough on education. So I decided to use what I have learnt in Data Analytics, to get a clear view of this debate.
Statistics were not comprehensive for recent years, so I selected the year 2010 for the global comparison. Here, I have visualized the expenditure on education (% of GDP) against the GDP per capita. This helps us to get a proper understanding about the global position of our country.
I have also changed the scale of Y axis to logarithmic scale to improve the visualization.
We can observe some clear exceptions such as Lithuania and Cuba who spend lavishly on education. Somehow they make it difficult to examine countries which spend low on education. So I have created the second plot below with some restrictions on the x-axis.
In this plot, green colour dash line represents the world statistics where as blue colour dash line represents South Asia statistics. In 2010, weighted average of GDP per capita (USD) of world is 9481.63 and of South Aisa 1285.52. Median expenditure on education (% of GDP) is 4.61 for world and 3.32 for South Asia.
It is quite obvious that Sri Lanka is way behind in terms of our expenditure on education. Though we are above the South Asian average for GDP per capita, we fall far behind the global and South Asian averages on educational expenditure.
If you observe countries with higher GDP per capita in top right corner, they spend generously on education. These countries such as Norway, Sweden, Estonia and Finland are known for good education systems. If you want to read further, the following website provides great insights on educational systems of several countries.
The Center on International Education Benchmarking provides information about and analysis of the education systems in…www.ncee.org
More expenditure on education does not necessarily mean good education nor vice versa. For example Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong spend relatively lesser amounts on education but are known for their quality education systems.
It is also interesting to look at how the expenditure on education has changed over the past from 1978 to 2012.
If we take a closer look at the trend,
Here we can observe that expenditure in Sri Lanka has drastically reduced compared to global and South Asian averages. Interestingly, global average is on the rise.
My data source for this simple analysis, is The World Bank.
World Bank Open Data provides free access to a large number of global development data sets which can be easily downloaded and processed using different analytical tools. Additionally they provide interactive plots to explore each data set.
In my analysis I have used the following two data sets from world bank and processed them using R.
GDP per capita (current US$)
GDP per capita is gross domestic product divided by midyear population. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or for depletion and degradation of natural resources. Data are in current U.S. dollars.
Source : World Bank national accounts data, and OECD National Accounts data.
Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP)
General government expenditure on education (current, capital, and transfers) is expressed as a percentage of GDP. It includes expenditure funded by transfers from international sources to government. General government usually refers to local, regional and central governments.
Source : United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics.
My expectation is to continue this analysis with more data sets so that we can create an intellectual conversation around facts and figures rather than arguing over assumptions and baseless statements by various parties. Also note that I am not a subject expert on education.
Suggestions for the next analysis are warmly welcome.
