This data set consists of a matrix in which the entries represent the number of years of compulsory education as defined in the legal framework. The rows denote countries and columns denote years. In total, the data set covers 173 countries over a time span of 281 years. Data where I suspect that compulsory education was not yet introduced has been coded as "0". Data where I don't know for sure has been coded as "NA". In building the dataset, I started with data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). More historic data has been added from a variety of sources.
