On the distributional impact of public education: evidence from Greece

Household budget survey data and public budget consolidated data for 1987/8 8 are combined to yield a non-estimation based measure of the benefit of pu blic education outlays in Greece. As expected for a country where education services are provided free of charge and the role of private education is limited, transfers in the fields of primary and secondary education contrib ute strongly to a decline in inequality. The distributional impact of terti ary education subsidies is shown to be negligible, although indirect eviden ce suggests that this could well be regressive. [JEL I21, D31] (C) 1999 Els evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.