International comparisons of rural-urban educational attainment: data and determinants

We study the rural-urban divide in educational attainment in a cross-country setting. In order to do this, we present a newly constructed cross-country data set measuring average educational attainment in rural and urban regions of 56 countries. This data set is used to study the sources of variation in (i) rural educational attainment, (ii) urban educational attainment, and (iii) the national disparities between rural and urban educational attainment. The empirical exercise is guided by human capital, labour market and migration theories and employs economic, demographic, political, cultural, geographic, and infrastructural explanatory variables. By employing general-to-specific and specific-to-general modelling approaches, we conclude that labour markets, the role of agriculture and credit constraint factors are all important in explaining cross-country variation in rural and urban educational attainment. We also find evidence that the level of development moderates the impact of factors affecting regional educational attainment, in particular credit constraint factors. We subject our results to a number of tests and find them to be robust.