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Comparative international educational attainment — Lee & Lee 2016

Source: R/data.R
lee_lee_2016.Rd

Long-run cross-country educational-attainment series compiled by Lee & Lee (2016), covering 111 countries every 5 years from 1870 to 2010. The bundled indicator is the cumulative share of the population aged 15–64 who completed at least the level indicated by level (primary, secondary, or tertiary). The dataset is the internal backing store consumed by get_attainment().

Usage

lee_lee_2016

Format

A tibble with approximately 29 000 rows and 12 columns:

year

integer. Reference year (1870–2010, in 5-year steps).

geo_level

character. Always "country".

geo_code

character. ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (e.g. "BRA", "USA", "ARG").

geo_name

character. English country name as supplied by the upstream source (e.g. "Brazil", "United Kingdom").

level

character. ISCED-style level: "primary", "secondary", or "tertiary".

dim_sex

character. "male", "female", or "total" (= Lee & Lee sex == "MF").

age_group

character. Always "15-64" — Lee & Lee report attainment for the population aged 15–64.

indicator

character. Always "attainment_share_completed".

value

double. Cumulative share (0–100) who completed at least the indicated level.

unit

character. Always "percent".

source

character. Always "lee_lee_2016".

source_note

character. Inline bibliographic reference.

Source

Lee, J.-W., & Lee, H. (2016). Human capital in the long run. Journal of Development Economics, 122, 147–169. doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.05.006 . Dataset: https://barrolee.github.io/BarroLeeDataSet/DataLeeLee.html. ETL script: data-raw/06_build_lee_lee_2016.R.

Cumulative encoding

Lee & Lee publish non-cumulative shares (lpc, lsc, lhc): fraction of the population whose highest completed level is primary / secondary / tertiary. The ETL script (data-raw/06_build_lee_lee_2016.R) sums the upper categories to express the more conventional "share who completed at least X" used in cross-country comparisons:

  • level = "primary" value = lpc + ls + lsc + lh + lhc

  • level = "secondary" value = lsc + lh + lhc

  • level = "tertiary" value = lhc

By construction, primary ≥ secondary ≥ tertiary for any (country, year, sex). To recover Lee & Lee's original non-cumulative values, subtract: e.g. "primary only (highest)" = primary - secondary.