This paper provides a new perspective on the varying efficiency levels among different education
systems by comparing data from six Sub-Saharan countries and fourteen Latin-American
countries. When comparing the effect of socio-economic status (SES) on education across
countries, researchers have always been faced with a trade-off between the accuracy of the SES
measure within countries and the comparability of the measure across countries. This has often
caused measures of SES to be incorrectly used to compare relative wealth across different
countries and contexts. This research paper sets forth a new methodology to adjust the traditional
measures of SES and make it more comparable across countries and surveys. Furthermore, the
comparable SES measure is applied to compare children in equally impoverished circumstances
across countries, sub-samples and datasets to enable the identification of the most disadvantaged
children across the world more accurately. More specifically this method will be applied to the
SACMEQ (sub-Saharan Africa) and SERCE (Latin America) education datasets and compare the
educational outcomes of those students living under the $2 a day poverty line. Most strikingly,
the comparison shows that Ugandan and Mozambican children living under the $2 a day poverty
line achieve much higher educational outcomes than similarly poor children in middle-income
countries such as South Africa and the Dominican Republic