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The “resource curse” phenomenon has been the subject of extensive research, with its causes and transmission mechanisms primarily examined from the perspectives of economic development and rent seeking. Education is a major factor contributing to economically sustainable development, owing to its potential for improving cognition and skill levels and thereby enhancing worker productivity. The crowding-out or crowding-in effect of natural resource dependence on public education spending has been identified as one of the key mechanisms of the resource curse or blessing. Using panel data from 31 Chinese provinces, this empirical study revealed a positive correlation between natural resource dependence and public education expenditure, demonstrating the impact of the crowding-in effect, exerted by natural resource dependence, on public education expenditure. Abundant natural resources can provide funds for education expenditure. The sample was further divided into eastern and central and western regions. The results indicate that the crowding-out effect of natural resource dependence only affects public education expenditure in the Eastern region, while the crowding-in effect of natural resource dependence on public education expenditure in the central and western regions. Research shows that the regional differences of crowding-out or crowding-in effect are very obvious, so the government should adopt transfer payment to promote balanced regional development. Better economic and social policies will help to translate wealth from natural resources into economic growth. Thus, a “resource blessing” may emerge to replace the “resource curse.” Fairly distributed and higher quality education will enhance human capital, thereby promoting economic growth from its current resource-driven pattern to a knowledge-driven pattern.

Much empirical literature has focused on investigating the role of government expenditure in promoting long-term economic growth in South Africa. However, few studies in comparison have considered the impact of government spending on literacy level in the country. To this end, this paper examines the impact of government spending on literacy rate in South Africa using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model with annual time series data over the period from 1994 to 2021. The key findings of this study are: (a) there is evidence of a long run relationship between government spending on education and the literacy rate in South Africa; (b) while the long run effect of government education spending on literacy is not significant, there is a statistically significant positive effect in the short run. These findings have several implications for policymakers and other stakeholders. Therefore, the study recommends that increased monitoring and evaluation mechanisms are desirable in the primary and secondary education sectors for accountability and reducing wastage of taxpayer funds. The Department of Education is also encouraged to re-consider current teacher training practices and fill long standing vacancies in the school sector that negatively impact education outcomes.

The former communist states experienced a period of turbulence in the transition to the market economy and then the accession to the EU, turbulences that also influenced the education sector. This article aims to analyze the impact of public spending on education on economic growth in 11 former communist Eastern European states, current EU members. The methodology used is ARDL with structural break. The results are consistent with those previously obtained The public education expenditure-economic growth relationship is mixed on long term; for five countries, there is no such thing; for six countries, there is one on a long term. On a short term, also, mixed results manifest for four countries are positive, and for two negative.

Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we developed an educational production function to examine how households with different income levels and parental human capital respond to changes in public spending. Our results suggest that there is a significant complementary effect between household inputs of time and money and public investments in the educational process. However, the results are heterogeneous in terms of different income levels. Rich families have more incentives to invest in their children, suggesting a crowd-in effect of public resources. In contrast, public spending crowds out private inputs for poor families, who care more about their own well-being. Moreover, we show that educational investments in parents have spill-over effects on their children, but the degrees of influence are different for the poor and the rich.

Economic theory establishes that pension privatization weakens the link between old and young and so reduces the incentive to invest in public education in an economy with lower return rate of capital than growth rate of wage. However, empirical studies of the link change are few. In this paper, we investigate the effects of pension privatization and the central government’s subsidy to individual accounts on public education spending in a three-period overlapping generation model. And then, we take contemporary pension reforms in a number of Chinese provinces as offering natural experiment conditions. Using a difference-in-difference framework and 282 municipal districts panel data over years 1998–2009, we test the pension-education theoretical link change. Both our theoretical and empirical results confirm that pension privatization is adversely associated with local public spending on education in China. Private pension subsidies, moreover, magnify this effect. Our study supports the theoretical assertion and selective empirical findings of a negative intergenerational effect of pension privatization.

Government spending on human capital continues to increase over the years. However, knowledge of the efficiency of such spending is limited. Using data from World Bank's World Development Indicator and World Governance Indicator from 2006 to 2017 and Data Envelopment Analysis and DEA Bootstrapping models, the study examined the relative technical efficiencies of public spending on human capital and their correlates in Africa. The study found public spending on health and education in Africa to be inefficient. Efficiency was much higher in health spending than in educational spending. Factors such as institutional quality, economic growth, government expenditure, foreign direct investment, and trade openness were found to influence the efficiency of public spending on human capital. Government should put in place measures to stimulate trade, ensure institutional quality and growth of urbanization to help improve efficiency in public spending.

This study provides a systematic review of the few existing studies on the impact of public tertiary education spending on tertiary enrollment. It identifies several shortcomings in this literature and reexamines this impact while addressing the identified shortcomings, which include: (i) using public expenditures on tertiary education per student as a measure of overall public expenditures on tertiary education, (ii) omitting public costs per student when estimating the impact of public tertiary education spending on tertiary enrollment, (iii) ignoring potential endogeneity, (iv) ignoring possible spurious correlations in large panels due to non-stationary data, and (v) not controlling for common time effects. In contrast to previous studies, this study finds, based on panel data for up to 149 countries between 1997 and 2018, a significant positive impact of public spending on tertiary education on tertiary enrollment that is robust to several sensitivity checks.

With the end of civil war in 1991, Ethiopia’s government launched a New Education and Training Policy in 1994 which, by the early 2000s, had already produced remarkable results. The gross enrollment ratio rose from 20 to 62 percent in primary education between 1993-94 and 2001-02; and in secondary and higher education it climbed, respectively, from 8 to 12 percent and from 0.5 to 1.7 percent. Yet the government can hardly afford to rest on its laurels. Primary education is still not universal, and already there are concerns about plummeting educational quality and the growing pressures to expand post-primary education. Addressing these challenges will require more resources, both public and private. Yet money alone is insufficient. Focusing on primary and secondary education, Education in Ethiopia argues for wise tradeoffs in the use of resources—a result that will often require reforming the arrangements for service delivery. These changes, in turn, need to be fostered by giving lower levels of government more leeway to adapt central standards—such as those for teacher recruitment and school construction—to local conditions, including local resource constraints; and by strengthening accountability for results at all levels of administration in the education system.

Intergenerational education mobility is a key dimension of social mobility and explores the extent to which educational attainment is transmitted across generations within a society. The implications of low education mobility concern both equity (everyone should have the same opportunities) and efficiency (it would be good for the economy and society if the most gifted and deserving young people were to study and not the children of the already educated). The literature identifies several drivers that can influence the level of social mobility in general and education mobility specifically, including characteristics of educational systems, public spending, degree of urbanisation, informal frictions, and beliefs. This paper seeks to identify 'patterns of intergenerational education (im)mobility' through a cluster analysis that takes into account the level of intergenerational mobility in education and a number of variables concerning its possible drivers, considering data on 82 countries (with different levels of development). The advantage of cluster analysis lies in the possibility of identifying regularities, but avoiding reasoning 'on average', i.e., safeguarding the possibility that different social patterns may exist. The results also allow us to speculate on possible policies to increase school mobility, highlighting, among other things, the 'equalising' role played by public spending on education.