Keywords

1 Introduction

This paper examines the Romanian Higher Education system from both a global and a regional comparative perspective. Though there have been some excellent general encapsulations of the Romanian higher education system (notably World Bank 2011; Curaj et al. 2015), these have tended not to include extensive international context. Part of this is a lack of readily comparable national datasets; unlike most other EU countries, Romania chooses not to submit data to the OECD’s annual publication Education at a Glance, which is the world’s most-read work of international comparative data. Indeed, the only regular international comparisons in which Romania can be found are in the excellent annual reports of the Consiliul National al Finantarii din Invatamantul Superior (CNFIS). However, these exercises are limited in two respects. First, they tend to focus on annual cross-sectional analysis, which limits the ability to construct a longer-term narrative. Second, for political reasons, the Romanian analysis tends to focus on other countries in the EU-27, and as one of the EU’s newest and least well-off members, any negative comparisons can be waived off as natural given the country’s economic position.

Yet, there are other kinds of comparisons that can be made and that, for several reasons, seem more fruitful. Romania is an outlier within the European Union for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, its higher education institutional structure—which is entirely university-based and containing no hybrid or short-cycle institutions—is most dissimilar to that of any other major European country. Second, the extent of its demographic transition and the economic dislocation that occurred during the transition to a mixed economy after 1989 is more similar to what was seen in the ex-Soviet Union than it is to anything seen in Western Europe. Third, the collapse of the country’s formerly extensive private higher education sector—partly a consequence of demographic decline, but more importantly a result of the Spiru Haret scandal—is essentially unprecedented anywhere in the world. Fourth and finally, the sector receives the least public support of any major system in the EU, even taking into account differences in the size of national economies. For all of these reasons, an exclusive focus on a set of mainly West European comparators—and moreover one which focuses on annual snapshots rather than longer-term historical analysis—probably results in a set of comparisons that does not do justice either to the system’s strengths or its weaknesses.

The purpose of this paper is to try to show Romanian higher education since 2006 in a different perspective: one which highlights the system’s evolution, with due attention paid to the four factors outlined above, and against a novel set of regional and global comparators. In order to do so, it takes advantage of a new database on global higher education, which has been developed by Higher Education Strategy Associates.

In this paper, we compare Romania individually to other members of a regional grouping of post-socialist countries, including Poland, Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, which along with Romania comprise the region’s five largest higher education systems. We also compare Romania to three larger aggregate comparators: Western European, the Global North and the World as a whole (see Appendix A for compositions of these groups). In so doing, we place Romania in a comparison group, which is closer to both in historical terms and present-day financial means, while at the same time providing a sense of where it stands in a broader global context. This dual set of comparators permit an understanding of the extent to which various aspects of the present condition of higher education in Romania are a shared condition among all regional comparators and to what extent they are a unique product of local circumstance, constraints and policy choices. The implications of these conditions for future economic growth in Romania are also briefly examined and discussed.

2 The Dataset

The dataset from which this analysis is drawn has been developed by Higher Education Strategy Associates over the past three years. It draws on specialized datasets available at the national level in order to enable more detailed global analyses than those available through the world’s two major extant databases, developed by UNESCO and the OECD. The former is geographically comprehensive but has severe limitations on topic coverage; the latter is more detailed in terms of topics but limited geographically to mainly the OECD, whose members cover at best about a third of the world’s higher education system, as measured by enrolments. The aim of this database is to combine the detail of the OECD’s work with the breadth of UNESCO’s coverage and—where possible—add some additional detail.

The database includes data on institutions, students and finances from 56 countries. The primary criterion for inclusion was whether the country possessed more than half a million students. We believe we have captured every country meeting this criterion save three—Algeria, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—which were excluded due to lack of data. Beyond that, a number of smaller countries which possessed publicly available data on institutions, students and finances were also included, either because they represented interesting policy models (e.g. Ireland, Israel, Singapore) or for reasons of creating better overall geographic balance (e.g. Burkina Faso, Benin). The full list of countries is shown in Appendix A.

For the purposes of this project, our definition of higher education (also called tertiary education) corresponds with the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011 levels 5, 6, 7 and 8. In general, ISCED 5 refers to short-cycle tertiary education, ISCED 6 to Bachelor’s-level or equivalent, ISCED 7 is Master’s-level or equivalent, and ISCED 8 is doctoral-level or equivalent. ISCED 4—which is what is known as “post-secondary” but not tertiary—is excluded from our analysis. This has a significant effect on student counts in countries like New Zealand and Canada, where the institutions known respectively as “polytechnics” and “community colleges” offer a mix of ISCED 4 and ISCED 5 programs.

That said, part of the goal of this publication is to present data in terms that are legible to readers in every country without relying too much on abstractions like ISCED levels. That requires portraying data by institution type, which is a more readily legible form of comparison for most readers. Yet, institutions of higher education look very different from one country to another, and even when institutions do appear similar, their national governments do not always categorize them similarly. This creates problems since national reporting conventions necessarily condition the available data. We have therefore, for the purposes of counting institutions and students, grouped institutions around the globe into seven categories. These include firstly five categories of higher education institutions (HEIs):

  • Comprehensive universities—These institutions deliver predominantly programs at ISCED level 6 or higher in four or more discrete fields of study. These fields of study should include both hard sciences (e.g. biology, chemistry, engineering) and arts or social sciences. This category also tends to be the default category for institutions classified as universities, where national systems do not separate their institutions into comprehensive or more specialized institutions. All 56 countries in this survey possess these institutions. In Romania, this includes all the universities which are classified as “comprehensive”;

  • Specialized universities—These institutions offer programs at ISCED level 6 or higher and award their own degrees in a narrow set of disciplines. Their disciplines are usually concentrated around a certain theme, such as education, religion, engineering, agriculture, medicine/pharmacy, fine arts or business. They can also include higher education run by the military or police forces. We identify such institutions in 31 countries in this survey, including Romania, where the definition includes all those universities classified as anything other than comprehensive.

  • University colleges—These institutions deliver education programs at ISCED level 6 or higher but do not award their own degrees. Instead, their degrees are awarded by an affiliated university. International branch campuses are included in this category. In total, 17 countries in this survey are considered to have such institutions. Romania does not possess institutions of this type.

  • Hybrids—Hybrids are a diverse group of vocationally oriented institutions, which may offer programs at basically all ISCED levels. Most hybrid students in most countries enroll at ISCED level 6, essentially pursuing long-cycle vocational programs. Thirty-four countries in this survey are considered to have such institutions, which are called universities of applied sciences in Western Europe; university institutions and technological schools in Colombia; simply private higher education providers in a number of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa; etc. Romania does not possess institutions of this type.

  • Short-cycle institutions—Short-cycle institutions predominantly offer programs at ISCED level 5 and generally do not offer programs above ISCED level 6. These institutions will often have a substantial minority share of their enrolments below ISCED level 5. Thirty-two countries in this survey are considered to have such institutions, which are called things like community colleges or two-year colleges in the United States; Junior Colleges in a number of Asian countries; polytechnics or polytechnic institutes in a few jurisdictions; etc. Romania does not possess institutions of this type.

A handful of countries also provide some higher education instruction either in secondary schools or what we term “semi-higher-education” institutions, which includes institutions that teach at multiple ISCED levels, including below level 5 as well as institutions that are not primarily educational, but still offer educational programming (e.g. hospitals, research units, recognized training facilities within firms). These institutions are excluded from this paper’s analysis.

This survey also distinguishes public and private higher education providers. As with institution-types, assigning institutions and students to each category is complicated by the fact that each country has a different way of defining public and private. In some countries, the dividing line is ownership; in others, it is the receipt of public funds. Wherever possible, we opt to follow the national definition, while recognizing that an institution with a certain level of autonomy might be classified as “public” in one country but would be considered “private” in another country. In a few cases, in order to generate more complete data, it was necessary to include institutions with a claim to being private (and indeed that might be considered private in national data) as public.

For purposes of geographic comparison, a two-level geographic system is used. At the first level, the HESA database divides the world geographically into a “Global North” and a “Global South”. Because higher education is usually a lagging indicator of economic development, it made sense not to group countries by current economic conditions or by GDP but rather by historical ones. For that reason, the Global South and Global North categories more or less line up with what used to be called the “developing world” or the “Third World” on the one hand and the “developed world” or the “First/Second World” on the other. The Global North is essentially those countries that were part of what was known as the Warsaw Pact (including Kazakhstan, which is usually considered part of the South) plus those countries that were OECD members in 1992 (minus Turkey, which for geographical reasons was placed in the South in the MENA region) plus South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

The second level divides each of these two super-regions into a small number of more geographically compact units, which are shown in Appendix A. The Global North is divided into four sub-regions: Western Europe, “Canzaus” (that is, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States), Advanced Asia (a group of five east-Asian jurisdictions plus Israel) and finally the East (Former Socialist) Bloc, which includes Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan.

3 System Size

Table 1 in Appendix B shows the most recent (2018) student numbers across our five comparator countries and three larger aggregate comparators. Figure 1 shows that globally, student numbers increased by over 50% between 2006 and 2018. There was also a growth in enrolment of about 20% in Western Europe. In the Global North as a whole, enrolments rose briefly until about 2011, before falling back to 2006 levels again by 2015 and remaining at this lower level thereafter. This was partly due to a fall in enrolments, particularly in private universities, in the United States; but it was also due to the demographic transition in the former socialist countries.

Table 1 Number of students by country, 2018
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Fig. 1
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Change in total enrolments, 2006–2018, (2006 \(=\) 100)

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As Fig. 1 clearly shows, all of the regional comparator countries saw declines in enrolment starting in about 2009 and lasting until about 2015. In no case was the decline in enrolment less than 20%. But the decline in Romanian enrolments was by far the sharpest and fiercest of any country: over 50% just between 2009 and 2014. It may have been the sharpest decline anywhere in the world, ever, outside of wartime. The demographic transition had a role to play here, but so too did the collapse in enrolments at the private Spiru Haret University following its blacklisting in 2010; at one point, the institution constituted roughly a third of registered students in the country.Footnote 1

4 Institutions and Institution Types

Table 2 in Appendix B shows the number of institutions by country and type in 2018. Different countries have different implicit policies with respect to institutional size: some prefer having a large number of small institutions; others prefer a smaller number of large institutions. In Fig. 2, we look not at the number of institutions but at the shape of the systems and the distribution of institutions across the five types, for all our regional and global comparators. It shows a number of important patterns. The first is that the “global” pattern of institutional distribution looks nothing like that of any country among the regional comparators, Europe, or even the global north as a whole. This is because the global total is vastly influenced by the structure in India, which has over 25,000 institutions, most of them university colleges. The second identifiable pattern is that Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine have similar institutional distributions, with very large numbers of short-cycle higher education institutions (known in Russia as “secondary professional education”) and universities. Of the regional systems, Poland is the one closest to European norms; that is, a large number of “hybrid institutions” and specialized universities, with short-cycle institutions and general-purpose universities being the minority.

Table 2 Number of institutions by country and type, 2018
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Fig. 2
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Distribution of institutions by institutional type, 2018

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Table 3 Number of students in thousands by country and institutional type, 2018
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Romania represents a different kind of system altogether. It is made up entirely of universities and specialized universities—no short-cycle education (which distinguishes it from the countries of the ex-Soviet region), and no hybrids (which distinguishes it from Poland). Very few higher education systems in the world have this kind of distribution, and it certainly makes Romania stand out within Europe.

Fig. 3
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Distribution of students by institutional type, 2018

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Table 4 Number of institutions by country and ownership, 2018
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Table 3 in Appendix B shows the number of students across institutional types for 2018. Figure 3 shows the distribution of students across types of higher education institutions in percentage terms for the same year. It is worth comparing this figure with Fig. 2 because it shows some common patterns. In all countries except Romania, the percentage of students enrolled in comprehensive universities far outstrips the comprehensive universities’ share of total HEIs; generally speaking, these institutions are larger than other types of institutions. In this comparison, Romania looks to be closest to Poland, which similarly has a relatively large and technically-oriented group of specialized universities.

Table 4 in Appendix B shows the number of institutions by ownership (i.e. private versus public). Figure 4 shows the proportional distribution of public and private institutions for all of our comparators. Globally, roughly two thirds of all higher education institutions are private in nature. The proportion is somewhat higher in the Global South than in the Global North. Interestingly, despite the explosion of private institutions in the post-socialist countries in the 1990s, the region actually has relatively fewer private institutions than other parts of Europe. Indeed, when it comes to the public-private split in institutions, Romania is the closest to the European average of all the post-socialist countries.

Fig. 4
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Distribution of institutions by ownership, 2018

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Fig. 5
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Proportion of students in private higher education institutions, 2006–18

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Figure 5 shows the proportion of students enrolled in private higher education institutions. Here we see a fairly mixed picture. Globally, the proportion of students in private institutions rose very slightly over the period 2006–2018, from 27 to 30%. In Western Europe, the proportion grew more significantly from 7 to 12%, but across the Global North, the proportion stayed relatively constant at 26%. This was because the growth in Western Europe was offset by falls in private-sector universities in both the United States and, to a much lesser extent, in the former socialist countries. Not all countries in the sector saw declining private enrolments: both Kazakhstan and Ukraine saw small rises. However, in Poland, Russia and, above all, Romania, the declines in the private sector were significant. This decrease was largely concentrated at a single institution, Spiru Haret University. However, even without this event, the Romanian pattern would have been similar to that of Poland and Russia, where the enrolment impact of the demographic transition fell disproportionately on the private sector.

5 Finances

Another major area of possible comparison between national higher education systems is financial resources. In many countries, it is possible to compare total revenues and expenditures by institutions; however, in Romania, as well as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, there is no centralized data on institutional income and expenditures, even among public institutions. In these three countries, only government expenditures are recorded centrally: while institutions may individually publish their income and expenditures, as a matter of public policy, none of these three countries bothers to aggregate or publish what institutions are doing with money received from non-governmental sources.

It can also be difficult to capture all of public higher expenditures effectively. Operating budgets are often recorded quite separately from capital budgets, research monies sometimes come from a different ministry, and money for student assistance (where such programs exist) may come from another budget altogether. “Public funding of higher education” means more than just transfers to institutions and indeed are frequently much more volatile, as well as prone to large year-on-year swings.

Figure 6 contrasts changes in real (that is, inflation-adjusted) Romanian public spending on higher education to that of its regional comparators. Again, the Romanian experience is quite different from others in the region. Expenditures rose dramatically in Romania in the years 2007–2009, mainly due to an enormous expansion of spending on capital equipment (“obiective de capital si alte dotări” in government accounts) as well as, to a lesser extent, on new construction (“investii si RK”). After the financial crisis, spending on these areas shrank to almost nil, while operating budgets were slimmed as much as 15% so that by 2012, the real spending was below where it was six years earlier. From 2015 onwards, however, spending began to recover so that total public spending on higher education was 40% higher than it was, in real terms, in 2006. Other countries in the region also have seen public expenditures on higher education fluctuate significantly, none more so than Ukraine, where spending began falling after the start of the conflict with Russia in 2014.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Change in real public expenditures on higher education, former socialist countries, 2006–18 (2006 \(=\) 100)

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Wider global averages are less volatile, in part, because as aggregates they smooth changes across countries, with spikes in one country cancelling out valleys in another, but also because wider averages are dominated by large, wealthy countries where spending tends to be more consistent. As Fig. 7 shows, the Romanian experience over the past fifteen years has been more volatile than others, but at the end of the day, the country’s spending levels have actually risen more quickly than both the West European average and the average of the developed world as a whole.

Fig. 7
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Change in real public expenditures on higher education, Romania versus select global averages, 2006–18 (2006 \(=\) 100)

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Fig. 8
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Public expenditures on higher education as a percentage of gross domestic product, former socialist countries, 2006–18

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Of course, public higher education expenditures are not simply a function of governments’ desire to pay: they are also a function of governments’ ability to pay. Particularly in countries where growth has been consistent and rapid—as it has been in Romania for much of the post-accession period—growing expenditure may simply reflect a growing economy, not a growing commitment to the sector. Comparing what governments spend as a percentage of their economy is, therefore, the subject of both Figs. 8 and 9.

Figure 8 shows that most post-socialist countries usually tend to spend between 0.5 and 1% of their GDP on higher education. Ukraine was a very big exception to this rule, but since the onset of the conflict with Russia, it is now being dragged back towards the regional average. Romania’s post-2015 growth in higher education expenditure looks much less impressive in GDP terms: measured as a function of the size of the economy, Romania remains the lowest-spending country in the region.

Figure 9 shows Romania in a wider comparative perspective, and it is not a flattering one. Romania’s current level of public expenditure is only 40% that of Western Europe and barely more than a third of the world average. For a country trying to lift itself into competition with the rest of the EU-27, this is almost certainly a major brake on long-term economic growth.

Fig. 9
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Public expenditures on higher education as a percentage of gross domestic product, Romania versus select global averages 2006–18

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A final way to look at spending data is to examine it on a per-student basis. This shows the former socialist countries in a very different light because, unlike the rest of the world, they are in a demographic decline, meaning that even stagnant spending can result in rising per-student expenditures. Figure 10 shows a very different picture than Figs. 6 and 8 in the sense that it shows more relatively uninterrupted growth across countries rather than volatility. In Romania, for example, per-student expenditures in 2018 were almost twice what they were in 2011, almost in equal measure due to economic growth and demographic decline. That said, a good amount of this increase might be chimerical because so much of the decline in student numbers occurred in institutions that did not receive public subsidies in the first place. When considering public expenditures per student in public institutions, the increase looks substantially less impressive.

Fig. 10
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Per-Student public expenditures on higher education in constant 2018 USD at PPP, former socialist countries, 2006–18

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Fig. 11
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Per-student public expenditures on higher education in constant 2018 USD at PPP, Romania versus select global averages, 2006–18

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Turning to wider comparisons, Fig. 11 shows Romania’s per-student public expenditures against averages for Western Europe, the Global North and the global average. As is plain from the graph, Romania’s per-student expenditures are actually rising more or less in line with expenditures across the Global North; in absolute terms they remain well short of global averages. It is below the world average for expenditures, and is only about a third of what it is in Western Europe.

6 Student Finances

Data on student finance is scarce in Romania, partly because of data lacunae, but partly also because Romania has chosen to do very little in terms of developing a centralized policy on student assistance. There is very little data collected on tuition fees charged in either public or private institutions, which means we know little about student payments beyond the simple number and proportion of students who pay fees. To the extent that there is grant-based student aid, it is distributed via a block per-student grant from the government to institutions, with the institutions responsible for identifying recipients and distributing the aid. However, there does not appear to be any centralized reporting on recipients (Proteasa and Miroiu 2015), so there are no national statistics on student grants (though Alexe, Haj and Murgescu 2015 is a valiant expert to show light on what is known about these awards). And, since the state has chosen not to implement a program of student loans, there is no data to use for international comparative purposes.

However, the one set of comparisons we can make with respect to student finances is the proportion of students required to pay at least some fees. And here again, we see that Romania is an outlier, due mainly to the collapse in the private higher education sector.

Fig. 12
figure 12

Percentage of students paying tuition fees, 2006–2018

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Globally, including in Western Europe, the norm is for 85% or more of students to have to pay some sort of tuition fee. But, post-socialist countries are moving in a different direction. Right across the region, Fig. 12 shows a trend where the share of students paying fees is declining. They did not all start or finish at the same level—most began the period with 50–60% of students paying fees, whereas Kazakhstan began the period nearer the global average at 90%. In all four comparator countries, the proportion paying fees fell by about 10%. In some cases, this was due to a declining share of students enrolled in private universities; in others, it had to do with governments making a greater share of spaces in public universities free-of-charge, while in still others, it was a mix of the two. As usual, Romania’s path was unique. At the outset of the period, the proportion of Romania’s students paying fees was rising and heading towards the global average. And then, post-2009, with the collapse of private student numbers, Romania quickly settled to the bottom of the regional average, with just 46% of students paying fees.

7 Conclusion

The data in this paper has demonstrated a number of facts about Romania’s higher education system. First, Romania’s higher education system is structured quite differently from most European systems, lacking as it is in either hybrids or short-cycle institutions. This does not necessarily mean that Romania is deficient or that it is in need of new types of institution, though it might behoove Romanian policy-makers to ask what is it about these other types of institutions that makes so many other governments see value in them. It does, however, mean that comparisons with other European countries need perhaps to be somewhat more nuanced than it is at present. Yes, other systems manage to educate more students, but they tend to do so in a set of institutions that are somewhat cheaper and with missions that are somewhat more applied than those of universities.

Second, between 2009 and 2013, enrolments in Romanian higher education underwent one of the largest collapses ever seen in peacetime anywhere in the world. In terms of enrolments, the fall was over 50% in just four years (a product of both demographic transition and the aftermath of the Spiru Haret University affair). To the extent that enrolments at Spiru Haret University were fictitious, to begin with, the collapse of enrolments at this institution could be seen as just a return to a previous “normal”. But, the effects of the demographic changes were equally serious, if not perhaps so unique, as most regional comparator countries saw something similar. It was the confluence of those two events that made the resulting fall so dramatic. The effects of this double collapse were felt much more seriously among private institutions than public ones: enrolments in private universities have fallen by nearly 85% since 2009, while the drop in public university enrolment has “merely” been around 25%. The decline in public enrolments alone would be a trauma in most countries; combined with the near-collapse of the private sector, the damage to higher education and indeed to the broader economy was immense. The loss of such a large amount of potentially skilled labour at exactly the time that the Romanian economy was beginning to grow quickly in the late 2000s is only one of the casualties of this phenomenon.

Third, and related to the demographics issue, is the fact that the Romanian system of higher education went from being one in which private funding has almost disappeared from the system. In this, Romania is similar to other countries in the East (former Socialist) Bloc, which—Kazakhstan excepted—have always had much lower percentages of fee-paying students than the rest of the world. Romania, like Ukraine, Russia and Poland, has seen a significant fall in the share of students paying tuition—but as was the case with enrolments, this drop was much more exaggerated in Romania than elsewhere. Partly this was a matter of simply having fewer students in the private sector, but it was also a consequence of the way Romania and other countries in the region finance public higher education, on the basis of a limited number of “free” (that is, fully-financed) spaces rather than based on total student numbers. In Romania, the number of free-fee spaces stayed roughly constant at just under 300,000 over the period in question; as total student numbers fell, that meant that the proportion of students that were fee-paying dropped inexorably. In theory, these policies of reducing the number of students paying fees are promoting an access goal; in practice, it is also reducing the amount of total funding available to institutions.

The final key finding here has to do with public funding. Here the longer-term picture is somewhat opaque. Funding went into long-term decline after 2009, but this was partially offset by the drop in student numbers, so that in public universities at least, the longer-term picture is one of very slight growth in per-student income (provided one ignores the sharp spike and then fall in various types of capital spending in the years just before 2009). However, more important than per-student expenditures are expenditures as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product. Here, Romania finds itself well below global standards, with public expenditures totalling only 40% of the West European and World averages. Coupled with the low rates of fee-paying students, this makes Romanian higher education one of the most poorly-funded systems in the entire world.

In total, this is not a pretty picture. When it joined the European Union, Romania joined a common economic area, which contains some of the world’s most advanced and technologically sophisticated economies in the world. There has always been the possibility that late-accession countries, including Romania, would end up as technological backwaters within the Union, forced to specialize in low-value-added activities such as agriculture and primary resources. The only way that Romania could converge towards EU-wide standards of living would be to converge with the rest of the Union in the development of knowledge-based industries. For a time, between 2006 and 2009, it seemed that Romania might do exactly that, with a growing student population and rapidly increasing expenditures on higher education. During this period, Romania was converging towards European and global norms. Not all of this convergence was real—the story of Spiru Haret University confuses the picture substantially—but some of it was, and that was a cause for hope. Since 2009, however, the story has been one of almost unremitting stagnation and decline.

The path of developing a knowledge-based economy is still open to Romania, but the sums being invested in higher education—both public and private—are simply nowhere near enough to allow the country to pursue it. A return to the ambition of the pre-2010 years is urgently needed if Romania is to avoid being locked into a low-innovation, low-income position within the European Union.

Appendix 1: List of Countries included in HESA Database

Global North (25)

Global South (31)

CANZAUS

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States

Latin America

Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru

Advanced Asia

Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan

East Asia

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam

Western Europe

Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom

MENA

Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey

  

South Asia

Bangladesh, India, Pakistan

Former East Bloc

Kazakhstan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine

Sub-Saharan Africa

Bénin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte-d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania

Appendix 2: Tables

See Tables 1, 2, 3 and 4.