Educational Gaps and Spatial Inequality in Argentina: Subnational Evidence
Abstract
This paper provides a territorial diagnosis of educational attainment in Argentina based on tabulations from the 2022 Population Census (INDEC), conceiving education as a stock of human capital. To ensure subnational comparability, it constructs indicators of complete and incomplete primary and secondary education for the population aged 18 and over, and of complete and incomplete higher education for the population aged 29 and over, thereby attenuating biases arising from differences in age structure. The descriptive and cartographic evidence reveals a stepwise pattern: territorial dispersion is limited at the primary level, widens at the secondary level, and becomes more intense and asymmetric in higher education. Along this gradient, the Northeast of Argentina (NEA) occupies lagging positions, particularly in secondary and higher education. Department-level disaggregation reveals marked intraregional heterogeneity, with urban poles concentrating higher levels of educational attainment and peripheral areas persistently exhibiting low values.
Keywords:
educational attainment, human capital, territorial heterogeneity, regional inequality, ArgentinaLicense
Copyright (c) 2026 Daniela Andrea Torrente, Agustín Francisco Lorenzin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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