Título en español: Las desigualdades, la calidad de la educación primaria y el desarrollo en América Latina y el Caribe.

Bibliografía p. 22-24.

This paper draws on a political economy model to hypothesize that the quality of education is likely to be lowered by both economic and political inequalities. In particular, we utilize a panel data set across countries and over time to test the applicability of the hypothesis to quality of education indicators at the primary level. Among the four specific indicators of primary education assigned priority in the World Millennium Development Goals, Gross Enrollment Rates, Net Enrollment Rates, Pupil-Teacher Ratios and Survival Rates from Grades 1 to 5, our focus is on Pupil-Teacher Ratio because of its close association with quality. Because of its considerable variation in political and economic inequality across countries as well as over time and its general reputation for high income inequality and gradual but uneven transition to democracy, our application is to countries of the Latin America and the Caribbean region. While the results do not support the economic inequality hypothesis, they do support the political inequality hypothesis. The latter results appear to be rather robust to alternative choices of estimation methods and empirical specifications.

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