21 indicators · 217 countries · 156,366 observations. Each indicator is read at the most recent year that still has near-complete coverage. Neither rule works alone: child stunting's newest year has six reporters, and internet use is best covered in 1990, when nearly every country reported it as zero.
Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP)
read at 2022 · 4 years old
General government spending on education as a share of GDP.
World median
4.06% of GDP
Countries reporting
164/ 217
Observations, all years
5.1k
The median is computed across the 164 countries reporting in 2022 — arithmetic over real values, not a published figure. Higher is better for this indicator.
How the world is spread · 2022
164 countries reporting · each bar is a count of countries, not a value · Pakistan 1.97 % of GDP
How much of the world was measured
Best year 2017 with 171 of 217 · most recent 2025 with 2. A short bar means the world did not measure, not that the value fell.
· Measures commitment, not results — spending more does not by itself produce learning.
· Excludes private and household spending, which is a large share of education costs in many countries.
What we can actually see
Coverage is wildly uneven, and that unevenness is a finding rather than a footnote. Life expectancy is near-universal; the survey-based indicators are not. Sorted by how much of the world reports at all.
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators. Nothing here is interpolated — where a country never reported, it is absent rather than estimated. Browse every country →