Countries Investing the Most in Public Education

From Namibia's 9% of GDP to a widening rich-poor funding gap.

Author

Philip Saparov
September 08, 2026

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Greetings, invested reader in the future of the classroom!

Every country says education matters.

Far fewer actually put their money where that claim is — and the gap between the two groups is larger, and more surprising, than most people assume.

So which nations are genuinely putting the biggest share of their economy behind their schools? And where is that commitment quietly eroding?

Let's dive in.

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Measured as a share of total economic output, the countries spending the most on education aren't the wealthiest nations on Earth — they're often smaller, developing economies making an outsized bet on their own future.

🇳🇦 Namibia leads the world, devoting 9.08% of its entire GDP to education.

🇱🇸 Lesotho follows at 6.62%, and 🇰🇼 Kuwait at 6.44%.

🇸🇿 Eswatini, 🇿🇦 South Africa, and 🇯🇲 Jamaica round out the top six, each above 5.5%.

None of these countries rank among the world's largest economies — proof that prioritizing education is as much a policy choice as it is a function of national wealth.

💡 Worth noting: Namibia's 9.08% share is more than double the global average of roughly 4.3%, a genuinely striking commitment for a country of just 3 million people.

2. Among Wealthy Nations, Who Spends Most on Education

Zoom in specifically on large, developed economies, and a different, more familiar set of countries takes the lead.

🇸🇪 Sweden spends 7.6% of GDP on education, the highest share of any major developed economy.

🇮🇸 Iceland follows at 7.1%.

The OECD average across its member nations sits at just 4.7% — meaning Sweden and Iceland spend well over half again as much, relative to the size of their economies, as the typical wealthy nation.

📊 Worth remembering: the United States, despite spending more in raw dollars than any country on Earth, sits at just 5.4% of GDP — solid, but well behind both Nordic leaders once you adjust for the size of the economy behind it.

Total education spending is one measure. Zooming in on higher education alone reveals a different, smaller set of national priorities.

🇳🇴 Norway devotes 1.8% of its entire GDP specifically to higher education — the highest share of any country measured.

🇦🇹 Austria follows at 1.6%.

🇱🇺 Luxembourg, despite being one of the world's wealthiest nations per capita, spends just 0.4% of GDP on higher education specifically — a reminder that overall wealth and higher-education priority don't always move together.

🔎 The nuance worth holding onto: a country can rank near the top on overall education spending while ranking near the bottom specifically on universities, depending on how it balances primary, secondary, and tertiary priorities.

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Rather than looking at national totals, this measure asks a more personal question: how much does a country actually spend behind each individual university student?

🇱🇺 Luxembourg spends $54,384 per tertiary student — more than three times the OECD average.

🇳🇴 Norway follows at $27,256 per student, also well above the norm.

The OECD average sits at just $15,102 per tertiary student — meaning Luxembourg spends more than three-and-a-half times the typical wealthy nation.

Luxembourg's extraordinary per-student number reflects its combination of a tiny population, an enormous GDP per capita, and a deliberate strategy of funding higher education generously despite spending a comparatively modest overall share of GDP on it.

💡 Worth sitting with: this is the same country that ranked last in Section 3 on higher-education spending as a share of GDP — a reminder that a small, wealthy nation can spend enormously per student while still representing a tiny fraction of its total economy.

Perhaps the starkest number in global education finance isn't a percentage at all — it's a simple dollar figure, per child, per year.

💰 In low-income countries, governments spend an average of just $55 per child per year on education.

💰 In high-income countries, that figure reaches $8,543 per child per year.

That's a gap of more than 155 times between the two groups — one of the widest disparities in public spending on any single service anywhere in the world.

🔎 Worth remembering: this gap exists even though many low-income countries devote a comparable or even higher share of their national budget to education — the difference is almost entirely a function of how much total wealth exists to tax and redistribute in the first place.

Even as overall education spending has risen in absolute dollar terms, its relative priority within government budgets has quietly slipped.

📉 Across OECD countries, education's average share of total government spending fell from 10.9% in 2015 to 10.1% in 2022.

That's a 6.9% relative decline — even though absolute education spending rose 13.1% over the same period.

The reason: other categories, including health, social protection, and debt servicing, grew even faster, edging education into a smaller relative slice of the pie even as the pie itself grew larger.

🔮 A prediction worth holding onto: as aging populations across wealthy nations push health and pension spending higher still, education's share of government budgets is likely to keep shrinking in relative terms — even in countries with no intention of actually cutting classroom funding.

Behind that modest OECD-wide average sits a small group of countries where education funding didn't just lose relative priority — it fell in absolute, real terms.

📉 🇲🇽 Mexico saw its total education spending decline by more than 15% in real terms between 2015 and 2022.

📉 🇱🇻 Latvia recorded a nearly identical drop of over 15% over the same period.

For comparison, the broader OECD average moved in the opposite direction entirely, with absolute education spending rising 13.1% over the same seven years.

🔎 Worth considering: while most wealthy nations were spending more on education even as its relative budget priority slipped, Mexico and Latvia represent a genuinely harder case — real, absolute cuts, not just a shrinking slice of a growing pie.

The story of who invests the most in public education isn't a single ranking — it's several overlapping stories.

Small, developing nations like Namibia and Lesotho are betting an outsized share of a modest economy on their schools. Wealthy Nordic nations are doing something similar from a much larger base.

Money alone doesn't guarantee good outcomes — but as this data makes clear, the amount of it varies more than almost any other measure of how seriously a nation takes its own future.

Stay informed, stay curious, and keep watching where the next generation's education is actually being funded.

Warm regards,

Shane Fulmer
Founder, WorldPopulationReview.com

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