The impact of educational homogamy on isolated illiteracy levels

In this paper, we explore the impacts that education expansion and increased levels in educational homogamy have had on couples’ isolated illiteracy rates, defined as the proportion of illiterates in union that are married to an illiterate partner. First, we develop the methodology to decompose isolated literacy rates into two main components: the educational distribution of the spouses and the level of homogamy. Second, we use harmonized international census microdata from IPUMS and Demographic Health Survey data for 73 countries and 217 samples to investigate which of the two components is more important in shaping the level of isolated illiteracy. Our results indicate that the expansion of education has been more powerful than the increases in the tendency toward homogamy in its impact on isolated illiteracy rates. As the percentage of illiterates decreases over time, an increasingly large proportion of them marry literate individuals, showing that opportunities for intermarriage among illiterates expand d espite the strengthening of homogamy.