This paper provides a new perspective on the varying efficiency levels among different
education systems by comparing data from six Sub-Saharan countries and fourteen
Latin-American countries. When comparing the effect of socio-economic status (SES) on
education across countries, researchers have always been faced with a trade-off
between the accuracy of the SES measure within countries and the comparability of the
measure across countries. This has often caused measures of SES to be incorrectly used
to compare relative wealth across different countries and contexts. This research paper
sets forth a new methodology to adjust the traditional measures of SES and make it
more comparable across countries and surveys. Furthermore, the comparable SES
measure is applied to compare children in equally impoverished circumstances across
countries, sub-samples and datasets to enable the identification of the most
disadvantaged children across the world more accurately. More specifically this method
will be applied to the SACMEQ (sub-Saharan Africa) and SERCE (Latin America)
education datasets and compare the educational outcomes of those students living
under the $2 a day poverty line. Most strikingly, the comparison shows that Ugandan
and Mozambican children living under the $2 a day poverty line achieve much higher
educational outcomes than similarly poor children in middle-income countries such as
South Africa and the Dominican Republic.