Analysis of Educational Distribution in Europe: Educational Attainment and Inequality Within Regions

The aim of this paper is to visualise and describe the educational attainment and inequality distributions and to detect patterns of global and local spatial autocorrelation, using the European Community Household Panel dataset for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000. It investigates the space-time dynamics of the European educational distributions measured as education level completed and age when the highest education level was completed. This paper also highlights the importance of spatial interaction and geographical location in the human capital performance of the European regions. Without imposing any prior restrictive assumptions on distributions, the exploratory analysis shows that education is geographically autocorrelated due to knowledge and skill diffusion and to the guidelines for education systems and structures which are, as a general rule, set nationally. Thus not only geographical factors such as location, but also institutional ones matter for spatial dependence. The exploratory analysis of the European educational distribution also illustrates the systematic differences between urban and rural areas and between North and South regions. Economies within a cluster interact more with each other than with those outside. Educational attainment is higher in the North and in urban areas, while educational inequality is lower in these areas. Hence spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity are indeed required features of the European educational analysis.