OECD Membership and Access to Education

The goal of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. This analysis aims to assess the impact of OECD membership on a country's ability to promote access to education. One of the key measures the OECD uses to gauge success is how well school systems in member countries can prepare young people. The OECD collects its own metrics to measure how well member states are living up to the goals of the organization. This creates the potential intrinsic bias; the organization has an obvious interest in using measures of success that paint it in a favorable light.

Using independent metrics to assess the impact of OECD’s policies is important because it offers a chance to assess whether international organizations actually have positive impacts on quality of life. Some critics claim the OECD and similar organizations are merely echo chambers for liberal thought. Many claim that the effect of international organizations is negligible because states can only act in their own self-interest interests and only cooperate only when it suits their own goals of security maximization. A strong correlation between adoption of OECD-endorsed best practices for improving access to education could also suggest ways for other struggling nations to boost their own education systems.

This research could also be used by other countries struggling to improve access to education within their own borders. In 2006, widespread protests erupted across Chile, as people grew increasingly exasperated with the privatized education system. Chile’s education had suffered for years under the Pinochet dictatorship, and while it showed some signs of recovery in the 1990s, it was still sharply criticized by for being strongly disposed in favor of the wealthy. In 2006, Chile had the most expensive education system in the world, but its primary education system ranked 119 out of 144 countries. The privatization of education meant access to education, particularly high quality schools, was strongly skewed in favor of the wealthy.

In this analysis, I use data collected from the World Bank to analyze whether joining the OECD had a measurable impact on access to education for children in Chile. I use difference-in-difference analysis to compare primary school enrollment between Chile and Argentina in the years before and after Chile joined the OECD. Access to education is measured using primary school enrollment because the data is only available through 2012, meaning there would not be significant data to measure the impact for older students. Common measures of educational quality, like literacy for example, would also be likely to show less realistic results.

While this does not offer evidence supporting the claim that all international organizations have measurable impact, or even that the OECD specifically is an effective organization, a statistically significant relationship between OECD membership and access to education in this case would offer some empirical evidence that membership in such organizations can create positive conditions for ordinary people.

I chose Chile and Argentina as my cases because while Chile joined the OECD in 2010, neighboring Argentina did not. Selecting neighboring states with shared colonial histories controls helps control for factors like region and culture. Both countries have populations that are nominally Roman Catholic, both are slowly transitioning to experience declining birth rates (which could potentially affect primary school enrollment), and both see more immigrants than émigrés.

The graph suggests that prior to 2010, when Chile joined the OECD, trends in primary school enrollment in Argentina and Chile were fairly similar. A slight deviation from Chile’s gradually increasing primary school enrollment in 2007 does not appear to detract substantially from the common trends assumption. In 2010, Chile experiences a sharp rise in primary school enrollment, while Argentina’s enrolment seems to hold steady.

The regression analysis (Appendix – Table 1) supports the assertion of a correlation between Chile’s decision to join the OECD and a sharp jump in primary school enrollment in that country. The robustness of the model is highly statistically significant, meaning that these relationships are not likely due to chance.

This is certainly not sufficient evidence to support a causal claim that joining the OECD improves access to education, but it does show that in this case, the decision to join the institution corresponded with a jump in primary school enrollments, and seems to support the OECD’s claims that it uses policy research to advise member states on ways to tangibly improve quality of life for their citizens. Joining the OECD was one of many steps Chile took towards improving the quality and equality of their education system over the past decade, but it seems to correspond with a dramatic rise in primary school enrollment.

Appendix:

Table 1: Difference-in-difference Regression

DV: Primary School Enrollment	Pre-2010	Post-2010	Difference
Chile	79.74***	101.33***	30.54***
Argentina	65.77***	79.74***	9.17
Difference	13.96***	21.59	21.42***

Table 2: Summary Statistics

Variable	Mean	Std. Dev.	Min	Max
Chile	87.39196	14.18264	74.80404	113.6486
Argentina	67.89266	5.886969	60.06174	75.55846