Replication package-Does Education Spending Drive Economic Growth? Dynamic Panel Evidence from Sub-Saharan African Economies

This paper examines whether secondary public education spending drives long-run economic growth across 47 Sub-Saharan African countries over 1970–2023. Most existing studies treat education expenditure as a uniform policy lever and impose slope homogeneity across structurally heterogeneous economies — methodological choices that obscure the institutional conditions determining spending effectiveness. This study addresses both limitations. The ARDL–Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator is used to accommodate cross-country heterogeneity in short-run dynamics while identifying a common long-run equilibrium. Baseline results reveal a positive but insignificant long-run association between secondary education spending and GDP per capita growth, with a significant negative interaction with corruption control — indicating that institutional weaknesses erode investment returns. The Francophone–Anglophone colonial divide is exploited as a quasi-institutional stratification strategy: Anglophone SSA exhibits stronger education–growth effects driven by human capital accumulation, while Francophone SSA relies on physical capital and trade openness as the operative growth channels — a contrast shaped by the CFA franc monetary architecture constraining Francophone fiscal discretion. Robustness is established via Dynamic Fixed Effects (DFE), instrumental variables (IV), and System GMM estimations. The findings indicate that the education–growth relationship in SSA is not unconditional: positive returns to secondary spending require governance quality to reach a minimum threshold of effectiveness. Efficiency-focused reforms that pair education investments with anti-corruption measures are necessary to unlock the growth potential of public education budgets. The replication package includes all Stata do-files, the full 47-country SSA panel dataset (1970–2023), and output tables sufficient to reproduce all reported results. Submitted to the African Development Review.