Globally, two-thirds of young people do not achieve basic skills that they ought to learn in school, finds a new study by the ifo Institute. “These are alarming numbers,” says Ludger Wößmann, Director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. The figure for the UK is 19.0 percent, for the US it is 24.7 percent, and for Canada it is 14.9 percent – but for Estonia, for example, it is only 10.5 percent. “This means a total loss of USD 700 trillion in global economic output over the remainder of the century,” says ifo researcher Sarah Gust.