Be warned...this is from BBC News Magazine, which IIRC, is BBC-Lite, and sometimes publishes some fluffy but boneheaded things. Case in point, not a single statistic or data source is cited here...it's just "One in 10 Icelanders will publish one." in one of the early paragraphs...I guess since that's the title, that makes it a fact?
I found a 2008 Guardian story that cites this statistic and sources it to "Recent research":
No source cited, but I assume it comes from the "Iceland Publishers Association", who is quoted in the lead. And the statistic is different:
> Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders.
So, more like 1 in 200, according to NPR, which likely got that number from a publishers' association, a group that has an incentive to promote such a statistic.
If you take 5 books per 1000 people over 20 years, that's 100 books per 1000 people. Of course, many of the same writers are on their 2nd+ novels so 1 in 10 seems unlikely, but I could see 1 in 20 people having a book published in their lifetime if everyone keeps publishing at the same rate they did in 2007
About 5 per 1,000 in a given year seems roughly correct. I don't know how you would calculate the figure for publications in a lifetime, especially since I presume many authors write multiple books in their lifetime.
If you're curious how other countries fare in books published per capita, I took some data and made a sortable table here: http://lukezapart.com/books_adjusted.html
Technically every university graduate produces thesis, those are published and stored in university library. So for many countries this rate is more like 5 in 10.
It's pretty common in Europe to write a bachelor's thesis as the capstone of an undergraduate degree. They're not always considered formally published, though (may vary by country).
In Australia, an Honours degree is technically an undergraduate degree, but a dissertation will nevertheless be "published" and kept in a university library.
BTW. I now realised I misread the parent poster. It's not true that more than 50% Poles have an advanced degree, what I meant was that more than 50% of people with a degree get an advanced degree.
I found a 2008 Guardian story that cites this statistic and sources it to "Recent research":
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/oct/03/1
Doing some more Googling, I found this NPR story from Dec 2012:
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/25/167537939/literary-iceland-rev...
No source cited, but I assume it comes from the "Iceland Publishers Association", who is quoted in the lead. And the statistic is different:
> Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world, with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders.
So, more like 1 in 200, according to NPR, which likely got that number from a publishers' association, a group that has an incentive to promote such a statistic.