Education Finance Watch 2023 (English)

The Education Finance Watch (EFW) is a collaborative effort between the World Bank (WB), the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report, and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). The EFW aims to provide an analysis of trends, patterns, and issues in education financing around the world. The EFW uses various sources of education, economic, and financial data from the World Bank, UIS, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The first volume of the EFW report (EFW2021) documented continuously increased global education spending in absolute terms over the decade but indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic would interrupt this trend. EFW2022 shed light on the impact of COVID-19 on global education spending in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and revealed that half the analyzed sample of countries reduced their annual education spending, in real terms. This year, the EFW2023 updates analyses on trends and patterns of education spending for the past 10 years, up to 2021, the second fiscal year after COVID-19. As a special theme of this year’s volume, the EFW2023 sheds light on changes in the school-age population and projects its fiscal implications for the upcoming ten years for selected countries. In 2021, low-income countries (LIC) increased year-on-year total education spending (a total of government, households, and development aid) in real terms. This increase was driven by an increase in government spending, which reached 50 percent of total education spending, while official development assistance (ODA) to LIC decreased both in absolute and relative terms.