Determinants of Development: Evaluation of Education

This study draws on a panel dataset from the World Development Indicators (WDI) covering
1995 to 2022 across diverse developing regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin
America & the Caribbean, East Asia & Pacific, Middle East & North Africa, and Europe &
Central Asia. High-income countries (those with a GNI per capita above $14,005) are filtered
out, sharpening the analysis on the development gap.
The Human Development Index (HDI) serves as the dependent variable given its
comprehensive portrayal of multidimensional development (education, health, income),
superior to purely economic indicators like GNI despite omitting political dimensions (UNDP,
2022). Core explanatory variables include educational attainment (school life expectancy),
institutional quality (derived and adjusted from Worldwide Governance Indicators), GDP per
capita, unemployment rate, investment (gross fixed capital formation), and life expectancy.
Statistically insignificant or highly collinear variables were omitted to ensure methodological
parsimony