KILM 14 reflects the levels and distribution of the knowledge and skills base of the labour force and unemployed. Table 14a shows the distribution of the educational attainment of the labour force for 122 countries, broken down by sex and by the following age cohorts wherever possible: total (15 years and over), youth (15 to 24 years), young adult (25 to 29 years) and adult (30 years and over). Table 14b shows the percentage distribution of a country’s total unemployed according to five levels of schooling – less than one year, pre-primary level, primary level, secondary level, and tertiary level. Table 14c provides information on the unemployment rate, that is, the share of the unemployed in the labour force, according to three groupings of educational attainment: primary or less, secondary and tertiary. Information is available for 132 countries in table 14b and for 95 countries in table 14c. Finally, table 14d presents information on illiteracy rates – the percentage of illiterate persons in the population – for the total, youth and adult populations for 151 countries.

In all countries, human resources represent, directly or indirectly, the most valuable and productive resource; countries traditionally depend on the health, strength and basic skills of their workers to produce goods and services for consumption and trade. The advance of complex organizations and knowledge requirements, as well as the introduction of sophisticated machinery and technology, means that economic growth and improvements in welfare increasingly depend on the degree of literacy and educational attainment of the total population. The population’s predisposition to acquire such skills can be enhanced by experience, informal and formal education, and training.

Although the natural endowments of the labour force remain relevant, continuing economic and technological change means that the bulk of human capital is now acquired, not only through initial education and training, but increasingly through adult education and enterprise or individual worker training, within the perspective of lifelong learning and career management. Unfortunately, quantitative data on lifelong learning, and indicators that monitor developments in the acquisition of knowledge and skills beyond formal education, are sparse. Statistics on levels of educational attainment, therefore, remain the best available indicators of labour force skill levels to date. These are important determinants of a country’s capacity to compete successfully and sustainably in world markets and to make efficient use of rapid technological advances. They also should affect the employability of workers.

The ability to examine educational levels in relation to occupation and income is also useful for policy formulation, as well as for a wide range of economic, social and labour market analyses. Statistics on levels and trends in educational attainment of the labour force can: (a) provide an indication of the capacity of countries to achieve important social and economic goals; (b) give insights into the broad skill structure of the labour force; (c) highlight the need to promote investments in education for different population groups; (d) support analysis of the influence of skill levels on economic outcomes and the success of different policies in raising the educational level of the workforce; (e) give an indication of the degree of inequality in the distribution of education resources between groups of the population, particularly between men and women, and within and between countries; and (f) provide an indication of the skills of the existing labour force, with a view to discovering untapped potential.

By focusing on the education characteristics of the unemployed, the KILM 14 indicator can also aid in analyses designed to shed light on how significant long-term events in the country, such as ongoing skill-based technological change, increased trade openness or shifts in the sectoral structure of the economy, alter the experience of high- and low-skilled workers in the labour market. The information provided can have important implications for both employment and education policy. If it is confirmed that persons with low education levels are at a higher risk of becoming unemployed, the political reaction may be either to seek to increase their education level or to create more low-skill occupations within the country.

Alternatively, a higher share of unemployment among persons with higher education could indicate a lack of sufficient professional and high-level technical jobs. In many countries, qualified jobseekers are being forced to accept employment below their skill level. Where the supply of qualified workers outpaces the increase in the number of professional and technical employment opportunities, high levels of skills-related underemployment (see the manuscript for KILM 12 for more information) are inevitable. A possible consequence of the presence of highly educated unemployed in a country is the “brain drain”, whereby educated professionals migrate in order to find employment in other areas of the world.

While not a labour market indicator in itself, the illiteracy rate of the population may be a useful proxy for basic educational attainment in the potential labour force. Literacy and numeracy are increasingly considered to be the basic minimal skills necessary for entry into the labour market.

Educational attainment1>

The seven categories of educational attainment used in KILM 14 are conceptually based on the ten levels of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). The ISCED was designed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the early 1970s to serve as an instrument suitable for assembling, compiling and presenting comparable indicators and statistics of education, both within countries and internationally. The original version of ISCED (ISCED-76) classified educational programmes by their content along two main axes: levels of education and fields of education. The cross-classification variables were maintained in the revised ISCED-97; however, the rules and criteria for allocating programmes to a level of education were clarified and tightened, and the fields of education were further elaborated.2 Many countries continue to classify education levels according to the levels of ISCED-76, but more and more countries have made the change to the nine levels and ten subcategories of ISCED-97. Tables 14a-14c clearly identify which classification system applies for each record. Both ISCED revisions are shown in Appendix C, but the main education levels are also summarized in the table below.

Education classifications used in KILM table 14

The major attainment levels in KILM 14 are primary, secondary and tertiary education. Primary education aims to provide the basic elements of education (for example, at elementary or primary school and lower secondary school) and corresponds to ISCED levels 1 and 2. Curricula are designed to give students a sound basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic, along with an elementary understanding of other subjects such as history, geography, natural science, social science, art, music and, in some cases, religious instruction. Some vocational programmes, often associated with relatively unskilled jobs, as well as apprenticeship programmes that require further education, are also included. Students generally begin primary education between the ages of 5 and 7 years and end at 13 to 15 years. Literacy programmes for adults, similar in content to programmes in primary education, are also classified under primary education.

Secondary education is provided at high schools, teacher-training schools at this level, and schools of a vocational or technical nature. General education continues to be an important constituent of the curricula, but separate subject presentation and more specialization are also found. Secondary education consists of ISCED levels 3 (designated “upper secondary education”) and 4 (designated “post-secondary non-tertiary education”), and students generally begin between 13 and 15 years of age and finish between 17 and 18 years of age. It should be noted that the KILM classifications of primary and secondary education differ from the classifications used in UNESCO publications, in which level 2 is termed “lower secondary education”.

Tertiary education is provided at universities, teacher-training colleges, higher professional schools and sometimes distance-learning institutions. It requires, as a minimum condition of admission, the successful completion of education at the secondary level or evidence of the attainment of an equivalent level of knowledge. It corresponds to ISCED levels 5, 6 and 7 (levels 5A, 5B and 6 in ISCED-97 and levels 5, 6 and 7 in ISCED-76).

In addition to primary, secondary and tertiary education, KILM 14 also covers three other categories of educational attainment that correspond to ISCED levels: less than one year of schooling (level X); pre-primary (level 0); and education not defined by level (ISCED-76 level 9).

The statistics on educational attainment of the labour force, including the unemployed, were obtained from the ILO LABORSTA online statistical database, the Caribbean Labour Statistics Dataset, the OECD and EUROSTAT online databases^. Information on educational attainment is typically collected through household surveys, official estimates and population censuses conducted by national statistical services.

Illiteracy rates

Literacy is defined as the skills to read and write a simple sentence about everyday life. Illiteracy is the inverse, that is, the lack of the skills to read and write a simple sentence about everyday life. The source of information for the number of illiterate persons and the illiteracy rates is UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics (UIS).3

The estimates are either national, based on data collected during national population censuses and household surveys, or are UIS estimates. Information about the model estimation methodology is available on the UIS website.

A number of factors can limit the appropriateness of using the indicators for comparisons of statistics on education between countries or over time. First, it should be noted that the same limitations relating to comparability of other indicators based on labour force apply here as well. The discussion in the corresponding section of the KILM 1 and 9 manuscripts should be read for additional details on the caveats relating to comparability.

In addition to the differences associated with varying information sources, the way in which individuals in the labour force are assigned to educational levels can also severely limit the feasibility of cross-country comparisons. Many countries have difficulty establishing links between their national classification and ISCED, especially with respect to technical or professional training programmes, short-term programmes and adult-oriented programmes (ranging around levels 3 and 5 of ISCED-76 and levels 3, 4 and 5 of ISCED-97). In numerous situations, ISCED classifications are not strictly adhered to; a country may choose to include level 3 (secondary) with levels 5, 6 and 7 (tertiary), e.g. Botswana; or levels 1 or 2 (primary) may include levels 0 (less than one year) and 1 (pre-primary), e.g. Canada. It should also be noted that in a few countries ISCED levels are combined in different way; for instance, levels 1 and 2 (taken together as the primary level) may refer to level 1 only, as in many countries in Latin America & the Caribbean, or to level 2 only, e.g. Austria. It is necessary to pay close attention to the notes – specifically, the notes given in the column “Classification note” – in order to ascertain the actual distribution of education levels before making comparisons.

An issue that affects several countries in the European Union subgroup of the Developed Economies originates from the way in which those who have received their highest level of education in apprenticeship systems are classified. The classification of apprenticeship in the “secondary” level – despite the fact that this involves one or more years of study and training beyond the conventional length of secondary schooling in other countries – can lower the reported proportion of the labour force or population with tertiary education, compared with countries where the vocational training is organized differently. This classification issue substantially holds down the levels of tertiary education reported by Austria and Germany, for instance, where the participation of young people in the apprenticeship system is widespread.

Limitations to comparability of information on illiteracy rates, as given in table 14d, exist because of variations in the definition of illiteracy. The most common definition is the inability to read and write a simple statement about everyday life. However, different countries have different social and cultural contexts, different definitions and standards of literacy, and different methodologies for collecting and compiling the literacy data, as well as variations in the quality of data collected, and caution is needed in comparing the literacy situations among countries and regions. Some countries define illiteracy, not by reading and writing aptitude, but by the years of schooling attained. For example, a person is categorized as illiterate in Estonia who has not completed primary education, and in Malaysia, an illiterate is a person who has never been to school. These countries, therefore, should not be compared against, say, Angola, where illiterate persons are defined as those who cannot easily read a letter or a newspaper.

Looking at the most recent available data for each country in table 14a, in 40 out of 91 countries with national (not geographically limited) estimates of labour force by education, more than half of the adult labour force has finished education at the primary level or below. Countries with large shares of the labour force having primary education or less are disproportionately in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and Asia. In Guatemala, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Nicaragua, Niger, Oman and Yemen, for the most recent year of available data, four out of five persons in the labour force had a primary-level education or less.

On the other end of the spectrum, the countries with the largest shares of the labour force having completed secondary education are disproportionately found in the Developed Economies & European Union and Central & South-Eastern Europe (non-EU) & CIS regions. In Azerbaijan in 2008, only 2.3 per cent of the workforce had only a primary-level education or less, with 75 per cent having completed secondary education and 22.5 per cent having completed tertiary education. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, less than 6 per cent of the labour force had achieved primary education or less, more than three-quarters of the labour force had completed secondary education and a further 17 per cent earned a tertiary degree.

In terms of gender-based differences, in 65 out of 88 countries with available national data by sex, a larger share of adult women in the labour force had earned a tertiary degree compared to the corresponding share of men. In some countries, however, women remain at a distinct disadvantage in terms of achieving educational parity with men, particularly in terms of completing secondary education. For instance, in Pakistan in 2008, nine out of ten adult women in the labour force had a primary-level education or less, compared with less than 60 per cent of men in the labour force, a difference of more than 31 percentage points. The same is true to a lesser extent in the Republic of Korea, where 37.1 per cent of adult women in the labour force had less a primary-level education or less in 2007 versus only 21.2 per cent of adult men.

Figure 14a shows the composition of the young adult and adult labour forces in terms of educational attainment for 12 selected developed and developing economies. Young adults (aged 25-29 years) are presented rather than the wider youth segment available in table 14a (aged 15-29 years) because some youth might not yet have achieved their final educational status. A working student at the university level aged 20 years, for example, would be classified as having attained only secondary-level education whereas by the age of 25 years she would have attained tertiary level. Looking at the wider youth age-band is useful in comparison to adults as demonstration of progress toward educational attainment across generations, but in comparing attainment of education at the highest, tertiary level, it is better to use only the age group “young adults”.

Figure 14a. Labour force by level of educational attainment of young adults (25-29) and adults (30+), selected developed and developing economies, latest years

Figure 14a. Labour force by level of educational attainment of young adults (25-29) and adults (30+), selected developed and developing economies, latest years

Figure 14a. Labour force by level of educational attainment of young adults (25-29) and adults (30+), selected developed and developing economies, latest years

Note: Adult age group for Croatia, Germany and Turkey is 30-74; for South Africa it is 30-64 and for the Philippines it is 35+.

Source: KILM table 14a.

In each of the countries shown in figure 14a except Germany and South Africa, a larger share of young adults in the labour force has a tertiary education as compared with adults, which implies increasing educational attainment among younger generations. In all of the countries except Germany, a smaller share of young adults in the labour force has only a primary education as compared with the adult labour force. In other words, the world’s labour force is gradually becoming better educated. Even though 90 per cent of the German labour force has either completed secondary or tertiary education, there is still concern regarding the 10 per cent of both the young adults and adults in the German labour force that have a primary education or less. In contrast to this, in Indonesia, Mexico, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Pakistan, over 50 per cent of both the young adult and adult labour force has a primary education or less. Similarly, in Costa Rica and Turkey, well over 50 per cent of the adult labour force has a primary education or less, but more than half of the young adult labour force has completed at least secondary education.

In table 14b, limiting the analysis to countries with data covering the year 2008 and later and leaving out observations for which the accompanying metadata indicate a variation on the standard educational groups (primary, secondary or tertiary) leaves a total of 71 observations. Persons with tertiary education make up the largest share of the unemployed in only four of the 71 economies: Belarus, Peru, Taiwan (China) and the United States. In 41 countries, persons with secondary education make up the largest share of the unemployed, while in the remaining 26 countries, persons with primary education make up largest share.

Figure 14b shows the distribution of the unemployed across three educational levels - primary or less, secondary and tertiary - in Mauritius between 2004 and 2010. Figures are shown separately for men and women. For women and men (but especially for women), persons with primary-level education or less comprise the largest share of the unemployed and the share has been growing over time. This is despite the fact that the share of persons with primary education or less in the labour force (as indicated in the analysis of table 14a) has been on a declining path for women and has changed little for men. The conclusion can, therefore, be drawn that persons with a primary-level education or less in Mauritius are at a growing disadvantage in terms of securing employment opportunities versus persons that have education at a higher level.

Figure 14b. Share of unemployed by level of educational attainment and sex in Mauritius, 2004-10

Figure 14b. Share of unemployed by level of educational attainment and sex in Mauritius, 2004-10

Figure 14b. Share of unemployed by level of educational attainment and sex in Mauritius, 2004-10

Source: KILM table 14b.

Country-level data corresponding to table 14c is shown in figure 14c. Unemployment rates are provided for three groups: jobseekers with primary education, secondary education and tertiary education and for two points in time, 2000 and 2010. This allows one to make hypotheses on the influence that the level of education has on the jobseekers chances of finding work, and to see if the trends have changed over time. In 2010, in 25 out of 27 countries, persons with primary-level education or less had the highest unemployment rates, the exceptions being Greece and Romania where the unemployment rates were higher among persons with secondary education. The labour market advantage of completing higher education was particularly striking in Slovakia. The unemployment rate of persons with a primary education or less in the country stood at 44.2 per cent in 2010, versus 14.1 per cent for persons with secondary education and 5.8 per cent for persons with a tertiary education. Similarly, in Lithuania, the unemployment rate among persons with a primary education or less stood at 39.2 per cent, versus 21.7 per cent among persons with a secondary education and 7.7 per cent among persons with a tertiary education.

As the year 2010 was the height of the recent global economic crisis in many countries, unemployment rates in 2010 tended to be higher than those in 2000. Persons with primary education or less fared the worst in terms of rising unemployment rates, with increases observed in 23 countries. The degree of increase in the unemployment rates between 2000 and 2010 was largest among persons with primary education in 21 countries. Among persons with secondary education, unemployment rates rose in 15 countries and fell in 11. The “graduate unemployed” were not spared either in the face of the economic crisis. The unemployment rate of persons with tertiary education rose in 18 countries and declined in eight countries. In two countries, Cyprus and Slovenia, the educated unemployed were the hardest hit, showing the largest increase in the unemployment rate over the period.

Figure 14c. Unemployment rates by educational level, selected developed economies, 2000 and 2010

Source: KILM table 14c.

Table 14d provides data on illiteracy rates for 151 countries, with 147 having data from the year 2005 or later. Focusing on the 147 countries, the highest total illiteracy rates are largely observed among countries in sub-Saharan Africa: in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger, total illiteracy rates exceed 70 per cent. The lowest reported illiteracy rates are predominantly observed in the Central & South-Eastern Europe (non-EU) & CIS region, with 20 countries reporting illiteracy rates of less than 1 per cent. Outside the Central & South-Eastern Europe (non-EU) & CIS region, Cuba and the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea are also among the countries with illiteracy rates reported to be below 1 per cent.

In some countries, large gaps are observed between men and women with respect to illiteracy rates, with female illiteracy rates typically exceeding the corresponding male rates. Figure 14d shows youth and adult illiteracy rates by sex for the ten countries in table 14d with the largest gaps between adult male and female illiteracy rates. In Yemen, 72.6 per cent of adult women were illiterate, versus 30.5 per cent of adult men, a difference of 42.1 percentage points. In all other countries shown in the figure, female illiteracy rates were more than 30 percentage points above the corresponding rates for men.

Looking at youth illiteracy rates in these countries provides some scope for optimism, however. In every country except Angola, youth illiteracy rates were lower than adult illiteracy rates, often by a wide margin, indicating that the younger generation has benefitted from improved educational outcomes. In Angola, which experienced a civil war until 2002, the youth male illiteracy rate was 3.3 percentage points above the corresponding rate for adult males, though the youth female illiteracy rate was 12.5 percentage points below the adult female rate. In all of the countries depicted in the figure, the gap in illiteracy rates between young women and men are far less than the gaps for adult men and women, indicating that the gender gap in illiteracy in these countries has narrowed over time.

Figure 14d. Youth and adult illiteracy rates by sex in ten countries with largest gender gaps in adult literacy rates, latest years

Figure 14d. Youth and adult illiteracy rates by sex in ten countries with largest gender gaps in adult literacy rates, latest years

Source: KILM table 14d.

Source: KILM table 14d.