Independent rankings built from public data — every figure traceable to the body that published it.
Report year 1990Data year 1990
Government expenditure on education (% of GDP)Higher is better — rank 1 leadsPublished by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
51 editions (1971–2023), 51 to 174 countries. What share of its economy a government spends on education. ⚠ A COMMITMENT MEASURE, NOT AN OUTCOME — it says what goes in, not what comes out, and the enrolment and completion rates on this site are where the results show up. ⚠ It is a share of GDP, so a poor country can rank above a rich one while spending far less per child in absolute terms; `education-spending-per-student` is the per-child view. Treating a higher share as better is the conventional reading and the one used here, but a very high figure sometimes reflects a small or shrinking economy rather than generosity. ⚠ Editions reporting fewer than 50 countries are not written — that drops UIS’s trailing stub year, which opens with a handful of early reporters, and any thin historical year. ⚠ UIS ranks nobody, so no rank is stored; the POSITION on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score and labelled as ours.
Government Spending on Education 1990 — UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)
Cite as: UNESCO Institute for Statistics. UIS Data Browser. Montreal: UNESCO Institute for Statistics.
Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0
UIS release 20260507-91260335. Read from the UIS API at full precision, as published — nothing is rounded here. ⚠ Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so anything derived from it carries the same ShareAlike obligation. UIS publishes no rank, so none is stored and none is derived here.
51 rows × 3 columns · imported from the publisher’s published data file on
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| Country | ISO Code | Government expenditure on education (% of GDP) |
|---|---|---|
| Tuvalu | TUV | 6.986 |
| Norway | NOR | 6.310 |
| Canada | CAN | 5.969 |
| Tunisia | TUN | 5.791 |
| Botswana | BWA | 5.740 |
| Eswatini | SWZ | 5.485 |
| Hungary | HUN | 5.414 |
| Finland | FIN | 5.339 |
| Netherlands | NLD | 5.221 |
| Sweden | SWE | 5.220 |
| Israel | ISR | 5.160 |
| Austria | AUT | 4.977 |
| Jamaica | JAM | 4.779 |
| South Africa | ZAF | 4.698 |
| Australia | AUS | 4.667 |
| Ireland | IRL | 4.601 |
| France | FRA | 4.555 |
| Morocco | MAR | 4.510 |
| Bulgaria | BGR | 4.454 |
| Switzerland | CHE | 4.392 |
| Iceland | ISL | 4.259 |
| United Kingdom | GBR | 4.056 |
| Malta | MLT | 3.831 |
| Iran | IRN | 3.774 |
| Trinidad and Tobago | TTO | 3.654 |
| Spain | ESP | 3.636 |
| Latvia | LVA | 3.578 |
| Portugal | PRT | 3.570 |
| Burundi | BDI | 3.359 |
| Cyprus | CYP | 3.339 |
| Cameroon | CMR | 3.287 |
| Bermuda | BMU | 3.136 |
| Mauritius | MUS | 3.128 |
| South Korea | KOR | 2.948 |
| Gambia | GMB | 2.826 |
| Pakistan | PAK | 2.517 |
| Oman | OMN | 2.492 |
| Hong Kong | HKG | 2.466 |
| Venezuela | VEN | 2.447 |
| Sri Lanka | LKA | 2.411 |
| Mexico | MEX | 2.325 |
| Brunei | BRN | 2.308 |
| Malawi | MWI | 2.247 |
| Central African Republic | CAF | 2.244 |
| Chile | CHL | 2.231 |
| Greece | GRC | 2.075 |
| Niger | NER | 2.074 |
| Bangladesh | BGD | 1.519 |
| Tanzania | TZA | 1.472 |
| Argentina | ARG | 1.067 |
| Paraguay | PRY | 1.041 |