Replication Package for: "Does Education Spending Drive Economic Growth? Dynamic Panel Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America"

This repository contains the complete replication package for the paper "Does Education Spending Drive Economic Growth? Dynamic Panel Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America" by Ernest Pele Botsyoe. The paper examines whether public secondary education spending promotes economic growth across 115 emerging and frontier economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (47 countries), Asia (38 countries), and Latin America (30 countries) over the period 1970–2023. Using Pooled Mean Group (PMG), Dynamic Fixed Effects (DFE), and System GMM estimators, the study shows that secondary education spending is growth-neutral or growth-reducing in low-governance environments, turning growth-enhancing only when corruption control surpasses a threshold most developing economies have not consistently reached. Below this governance ceiling, education budgets are absorbed by procurement leakage and patronage rather than productive classroom inputs. Above it, a one-standard-deviation improvement in governance fully reverses the spending penalty. Colonial heritage further compounds the divide: Anglophone Sub-Saharan African countries deliver education returns nearly thirty times larger than their Francophone counterparts. The package includes: Panel dataset (115 economies, 1970–2023) with all variables as defined in the paper Stata do-files for PMG, DFE, and System GMM estimation Robustness check scripts (cross-regional subsamples, alternative governance measures) Output tables corresponding to all results reported in the manuscript Data sources: World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI); World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). Keywords: secondary education spending; economic growth; pooled mean group; governance; corruption control; colonial legacy; Sub-Saharan Africa; Asia; Latin America; panel econometrics