What is the total government spending for education? How much does it vary in the developing and developed world?

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Spending for education amounted to 4.9% of global GNI in 2007, increasing slightly from 4.6% in 1999. Spending for education represents one of the three major government expenses. Although not a rule for all the countries, it seems that military spending leads in the list of how governments around the world allocate their budgets, with health and education ccoming second and third respectively. For example, the USA allocated around 19.3% of its government budget on military expenses, 19.3% more on health and 17.1% for education. In the UAE 45.7% of the government budget goes for military spending, 8.7% for health and 22.5% for education. India China and Russia follow the same pattern with more of the government budget allocated for military expenses, second comes education and third health.In the EU, however, things differentiate to some degree. In Germany, for example,3.3% goes for military expenses, 9.5% for education and 17.9% for health expenses. The same pattern may also be seen in Norway, Sweden, UK, France and Spain.
Of course government spending for education differs substantially from one part of the world to the other. The state of the development of the country or the region correlates with the spending however, there seems to be a negative correlation, in most cases, between the number of students per region and total spending for educational expenses. USA with less than 5% of global student population, accounts for 28% of global public educational expenditure. The rest of North America and Western Europe with 5% of global student age population are responsible for 27% of global government spending on education. The Sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand,with 15% of global student age population accounts for just 2.4% of total government spending on education.

Indicative are also the figures of spending per pupil per region. For North America and Western Europe the figure comes up to $5614 in 2007, for Latin America to $972 and for Sub-Saharan Africa to $130.