I am lucky enough to have received an above-average education, in maths at least. It's definetly not the norm in Romania, especially in the countryside, and I could talk a lot more about the various issues that relate to this, but that's a bit beside the point.

I'm not really familiar with the education systems of the rest of the world, much less with their maths curricula, but I think that we generally cover more material in a shorter amount of time (which is not really a good thing, in my opinion, but it is what it is).

There was a lot of talk in the media a couple of years back about how our country performs poorly in the PISA tests, so our education is worse overall than the rest of the world. I can't really research the exact numbers right now, but I will try when I get the chance.

I would attribute the exhaustiveness mostly to my teachers. The books I used most were reasonably exhaustive in terms of range and domain definitions, but in all honesty I've also seen many books that were atrocious in this regard. Teachers here have quite a lot of freedom when it comes to details like these, so as long as they cover all the material, no one (in the administration) really cares about how they do it.