Effect of public education financing on educational quality in sub-Saharan Africa: an autoregressive distributed lag approach

Education plays an essential role in improving the welfare of society. Governments, therefore, invest huge sums of money in education. However, there is a lack of conclusive evidence regarding the impact of public education funding on educational outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, this study analyses the short-run and long-run effects of public education financing on the quality of education in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag model on annual time series data from the World Bank from 1970 to 2021. The results show that public education financing significantly affects the pupil-teacher ratio in the short run at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. In the long run, however, public education financing significantly affects the pupil-teacher ratio only at the secondary and tertiary levels. The study’s findings imply that increased public education spending effectively improves education quality in sub-Saharan Africa in the short and long run. Therefore, sub-Saharan Africa must make sufficient budgetary allocations to education to enhance educational quality in the sub-region.