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Demographic Change and the Education System
efficiency of educational trajectories would enable the per-student benefit to increase for all but upper secondary education. Essentially, per-student spending in the medium term would reach 6.9 percent of GDP per potential worker for early childhood, 9.9 percent for primary, and 10.8 percent for basic secondary education. In contrast, for upper secondary, the substantial increase in coverage required would entail cutting per-student spending if aggregate funding remained the same, even allowing for the effects of the demographic dividend and a substantial improvement in efficiency. In this case, the estimated per-student spending relative to potential GDP would be around 8.5 percent, which is lower than the projection for primary education. In all of the cases, per-student spending relative to GDP per potential worker would be very different from that in relatively more developed countries (see table 6.1). If we compare the long-term per-student spending that emerges from Scenario 2 with the current OECD average, the differences vary from 3.8 percentage points of GDP per worker (primary) to 6.5 percentage points of GDP per worker (upper secondary). The following figures illustrate how much funding should rise relative to GDP to achieve per-student spending goals equal to the OECD average for each education level. We compare these numbers with those produced by incorporating the coverage and efficiency goals, while keeping per-student spending constant. In the case of early childhood education, if the per-student benefit were to remain at the current level, the fall in the school-age dependency index would more than offset the increase in coverage, which would translate into a slight reduction in the required funding, from 0.4 percent of GDP to 0.36 percent of GDP in 2100 (figure 6.23). However, incorporating a goal of increasing per- student spending to the relative level of the OECD average would increase the required funding by approximately 0.3 percent of GDP (the difference between the blue line and the orange line). The financing needs would increase noticeably until the coverage goal was reached (in 2025 under the proposed scenario), and fall moderately later. The maximum funding in this scenario would be 0.77 percent of GDP in 2025. In primary education, where coverage is already practically universal, the fall in the SDR while per-student spending remains constant would translate into a reduced need for financing from 1.2 percent to 0.9 percent of GDP by 2050, and remain stable thereafter. Incorporating the goal of reducing over-age enrollment produces practically the same conclusion. In a more ambitious goal of increasing per-student spending to the OECD average, 0.7 percent more of GDP would be needed to fund it. The increased funding requirements would present themselves in 2025, the year it is assumed that the efficiency and perstudent spending objectives for primary education would be reached, and would grow to as much as 1.8 percent of GDP, falling to 1.6 percent of GDP in the long term (figure 6.24). In the case of basic secondary education, if per-student spending were to remain constant, funding needs would remain practically the same under the universal coverage objective, or would fall by 0.2 percent of GDP under the Demographic Change in Uruguay • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0844-9