Education and the Transition from Communism

Abstract

We use OECD-PISA data on a standardized international reading test to evaluate the performance of 15-year olds n five countries in transition from communism: Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Latvia and Russia. Parental education contributes strongly to performance as do other indicators of parental quality such as books in the household and interacting with children. Wealth effects are mixed; possessions associated with intellectual activity such as calculators help while pure conveniences such as dishwashers actually harm performance. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland outperform Latvia and Russia with the differences largely due to the relative performance of the students with the most favorable backgrounds.