Education

This article describes the relationship between education and social policy across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) region. It first provides an overview of the variety of education regimes in advanced industrialized democracies. Then, an analytical framework is presented, locating the political and institutional foundations of diverse development paths that helps make sense of the observed variation of education regimes. Analysis reveals that the observed spending patterns are related to and driven by differences in public and private spending on tertiary education. Moreover, some factors such as the state-church conflict appear to be more significant in the case of education, while others (decentralization and federalism) seem likely to influence the development of education in ways rather different from social policy