What investments raise school outcome: improving school quality or increasing school quantity?

Abstract

With an international comparison of 142 countries for the period of 1960-1990, the regression analysis in this study reveals the different impacts of school quantity (represent by the length of compulsory schooling) and school quality (per-student expenditures and student-teacher ratio) on school output (literacy rate and repetition rate). Although inputs from both school quantity and quality are significantly influencing the school output in general, the magnitudes of such impacts are various at the different stages of schooling as well as the different time period. Comparing the countries with primary compulsory schooling and the countries with secondary compulsory schooling, school quantity plays a more important role than school quality in determining school output at the primary stage. The contribution of improving in school quality to school output tends to be increasingly significant when the length of compulsory schooling has reached a sufficiently high level.