Economics of Education Review 20 (2001) 305–306
www.elsevier.com/locate/econedurev
Book review
The Private Costs of Public Schooling: Household and Community Financing of Primary Education in Cambodia;
Mark Bray; International Institute for Educational Plan-ning and UNICEF. Paris 1999. 127 pp. Paperback. $10.00.
Cambodia is one of the least developed countries in the world, and one of the poorest. Four out of ten house-holds live below the poverty line, in a country whose annual GDP per capita is about US$300. Government pays an average of US$20 per teacher per month, or an average of US$6.48 per pupil per annum. Education receives about 10 per cent of the national budget, almost all of which goes to pay salaries. It is understandable that schooling has had to depend on assistance from sources beyond the government, although primary school edu-cation in Cambodia is officially free. While the vast majority of primary schools in Cambodia are public, a large proportion of their financial support comes from non-government sources. The book details the full costs of such schooling: exercise books, stationery, uniforms, travel to school, supplementary tutoring, and the opport-unity costs of foregone income. It estimates that the resource inputs into primary education are: Government (12.5%); politicians (10.4%); NGOs and external aid agencies (18%); households and communities (59.9%); school generated income (0.1%).
The author has carried out a number of consultancies within Cambodia in recent years, and the book benefits from the broad knowledge and understanding he has gained, as well as the cooperation he was able to secure from the education authorities at central, provincial and school levels. He conducted a number of workshops in selected provinces with the assistance of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport as well as UNICEF and UNESCO, and the book provides a wealth of data on the costs of schooling, based on this field work as well as extensive literature research within Cambodia princi-pally. The text is supported by a number of small case studies, showing the impact of private financial support on students, teachers, and parents.
The book is simply written and neatly arranged. It pro-vides a comparative overview of household and com-munity financing of education, examines the nature of
* Tel.: 12803712; fax: 855 23 211909.
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Cambodian society, economy and education, details its methods of data collection, analyses its data in terms of sources of resource inputs into primary education, school level management of household and community financ-ing, considers the implications of private financing in terms of equity, access and efficiency, and concludes with a chapter analysing the paradoxes and dilemmas facing education policy and planning officials concerned with the financing of education.
There is considerable scope to improve the public financing of primary education. Government intention is to increase the proportion of the national budget devoted to education from its present 10 per cent to 15 per cent by 2004; this 10 per cent represents only one per cent of Gross National Product, compared with the regional average of four per cent. This low ratio is because of the low ratio of taxation to Gross Domestic Product: it is six per cent in Cambodia, compared with ratios ranging from 9.1 per cent to 20.6 per cent in neighbouring countries. The issue at the heart of the book is the extent to which primary schools should depend on government financial support. Dr. Bray points out that there is a tra-dition in Cambodia of community financial support for education, and that a high proportion of schools have functioning school committees. Donations from poli-ticians encourage matching funds from other sources. Nevertheless there is an international move towards reconsidering the imposition of fees in basic education. Government policy of “free” education does not square with the reality that communities are providing about 60 per cent of costs. Many schools lack the management and financial expertise to promote good planning and careful expenditure of funds. There are also very wide discrepancies across the country in the ability of com-munities to provide and attract funds.
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butions are mainly disguised government financing. Government has lacked not the capacity but the will to increase the share of the education budget from 10 per cent since 1994. There is a fundamental need for a greater push for government to develop a more efficient and reliable taxation system in order to increase its own revenue, to control its own official budgetary expendi-tures, and to implement its own plans to increase edu-cation’s share of the budget.
The book is a useful contribution to the financing of primary education in Cambodia, and the issues it raises have repercussions also for secondary and higher
edu-cation in terms of fees, supplementary tuition, and equity of access. Many other countries which face problems similar to those of Cambodia will benefit from the analy-ses presented in this book. Those with similar problems but which lack the same range of data should be inspired to follow this model of data collection and analysis.
Geoffrey Coyne
*Department of Planning, Ministry of Education, Youth
