The Expansion of Public Spending and Mass Education in Bolivia: Did the 1952 Revolution Represent a Permanent Shock?

Abstract

This chapter aims at analyzing whether educational spending in Bolivia fits well into the regional description or, by contrast, changed radically and took distance from the Latin American pattern after the 1952 Revolution. Taking advantage of new quantitative evidence, the chapter stresses that the Revolution did not imply, in the long term, a substantial modification of the quality and redistributive character of the Bolivian education system. Four main findings support this claim: public spending in education was hardly sustainable over time; education spending, controlled by pc GDP, was not outstanding by international standards; the inexistence of a substantial support to primary education may have reduced the redistributive impact of education spending; and education outputs, either in quantity or quality terms, were often among the worse in the region.