Higher Education Expenditure in Europe. Exploring Evidence of Inequality and Free-Rider Problem

The study of inequality in higher education is a consolidated topic that includes important contributions from various approaches and fields. In the European context, it is a relevant issue when analysing the impacts of the economic crisis, especially in the countries of Southern Europe. In this article, we present a study of higher education expenditure in Europe, proposing an approach that adapts the Gini coefficient. The most relevant result is that educational inequality is distributed inversely with respect to the distribution of economic inequality, which highlights a case of free-rider behaviour, according to The Logic of Collective Action (Olson, 1965), whereby social groups with higher incomes benefit from the public good. This result can contribute to the debate on how public goods are distributed in an unequal society.