Children born in Romania today will be 60% as productive when they grow up as they could be if they enjoyed complete education and full health, according to the World Bank’s Human Capital Index (HCI).

With a score of 0.60, on a scale from 0 to 1, Romania thus ranks 67 in the world, out of 157 countries included in this study.

Moreover, Romania has the lowest score in the European Union and one of the lowest in the region, being surpassed even by countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania (0.62 each) and Georgia (0.61), while Slovenia (0.79), Czech Republic (0.78) and Serbia (0.76) are the regional leaders in terms of human development.

Singapore ranks first in the world, with a score of 0.88, followed by South Korea and Japan, with 0.84, Hong Kong – 0.82, Finland and Ireland – 0.81 each.

The HCI measures the amount of human capital that a child born today can expect to attain by age 18. It conveys the productivity of the next generation of workers compared to a benchmark of complete education and full health. It is made up of five indicators: the probability of survival to age five, a child’s expected years of schooling, harmonized test scores as a measure of quality of learning, adult survival rate (fraction of 15-year olds that will survive to age 60), and the proportion of children who are not stunted.

In Romania, 99% of children survive to age 5. However, the country scores only slightly above average in terms of education. Thus, children who starts school at age 4 can expect to complete 12.2 years of school by their 18th birthday, but factoring in what children actually learn, it’s as if they spend only 8.8 years in school. Students in Romania score 452 on a scale where 625 represents advanced attainment and 300 represents minimum attainment.

Across Romania, 87% of 15-year olds will survive until age 60. The HCI for girls in Romania (0.63) is higher than for boys (0.58). What is more worrying is that, the HCI value for Romania decreased from 0.63 to 0.60, between 2012 and 2017.

The full report on Romania is available here.

editor@romania-insider.com