We began by calculating, at the student level for each country, correlations between each construct and each of the proficiencies in the content domains (i.e., mathematics, reading, and science).
The use of fixed, as opposed to estimated, category intercepts was not anticipated to be of substantial consequence to the proposed question of interest, which concerned the direction and magnitude of the between- country correlations observed.
Because of the high cross-country correlation between GDP per capita and other socioeconomic variables, the environmental Kuznets curve for deforestation may be driven, among other factors, by changes in the yields of non-forested land10 as well as by access to credit, which in turn affects the liquidity constraints faced by forest owners in developing economies35.
However, as shown in Fig. 2, the between-country correlation is strongly in the opposite direction.
Yet, overall,Venn (2012) finds little cross-country correlation between the different aspects of eligibility strictness.
Panel A of Fig. 2 shows that there is a high cross-country correlation between both estimates (0.69), suggesting a fair degree of accurateness of the Enterprise Surveys data.
The statistics in Table 4 suggest that the subsample provides a good approximation to the full sample in reproducing approximately the same between-country correlation observed in the full data.
The correlations observed between ERS and education in prior work, are in a direction that could in theory explain the peculiar between-country correlation between attitudes and achievement seen in PISA.
Despite detectable variability in ERS across countries and detectable biasing effects of ERS on attitudinal scores, our results suggest that the unexpected between-country correlation between attitudes and achievement is not attributable to country differences in ERS.
As the primary interest of the current paper is to address the between-country correlation between mean attitudes and mean achievement, we expand the model in the previous section to also include a student-level achievement variable.
OECD Division Head Andreas Schleicher points out: "The cross-country correlation is high (+0.51) between the proportion of students performing below proficiency level 3 in PISA and expected years not in education and unemployed or out of the labor force.
