THERE ARE some things money can't buy. Education, however, does not appear to be among them-at least as measured by performance on international exams. On average, pupils in wealthy countries obtain vastly higher test scores than those in developing ones. In turn, strong students tend to become productive workers, making the mostly rich economies they join richer still. The exact mechanism by which knowledge is bought remains unclear. Do students in the rich world fare better because their governments provide superior schools? Or is the reason that they tend to have richer parents, and enjoy more educational resources at home? A new working paper by Dev Patel of Harvard University and Justin Sandefur of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank, offers strong evidence that the wealth of a country affects exam results just as much as the wealth of a pupil's household does.
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