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Latin America's Most Regressive Tax

An AQ Charticle illustrates how disproportionate funding privileges universities over primary and secondary schools in Latin America.

In an ideal world, public education spending should be distributed so that it has the greatest economic and social benefit and reaches the highest number of students. Given the benefits of basic education for socioeconomic development, this would mean investing more in primary and secondary education. But AQ finds that this is not the case in Latin America.
 
In its signature charticle, the Fall 2010 issue of Americas Quarterly documents the disproportionate funds allocated by countries to tertiary education. For example, AQ reveals that in Mexico, only 24.7 percent of total students are enrolled in university, but they receive nearly three times the taxpayer dollars per student than do primary school students. Compounding this regressive spending policy is the fact that, across Latin America, far fewer students are enrolled in tertiary education than primary education: in 2005 net primary education enrollment in the region was 93.8 percent, compared to 30.4 percent for tertiary education.
 
For more information and to see a visual representation of these and other data, view the full charticle.
 

Illustration by Peter Hoey.

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