Does public spending on tertiary education increase tertiary enrollment?
Evidence from a large panel of countries
Publication date
2025-04-28
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Bala, Patrick
Organisational unit
Scopus ID
Publisher
De Gruyter
Series or journal
ISSN
Periodical volume
76
Periodical issue
1
First page
81
Last page
106
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Keyword
GMM
public costs per student
public tertiary education spending
tertiary enrollment
Abstract
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 T 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.
Description
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Version
Published version
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