Replication Data for: "Education Spending and the FDI–Growth Nexus: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia

This repository contains the replication data and code for the paper "Education Spending and the FDI–Growth Nexus: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia" (Botsyoe, 2025). The paper examines whether public education expenditure conditions the growth effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) across 115 economies in Sub-Saharan Africa (47), Latin America (30), and Asia (38) over the period 1970–2023. Using a Pooled Mean Group (PMG) error-correction framework with Dynamic Fixed Effects (DFE), Instrumental Variables (IV), and System GMM robustness checks, the study finds that the FDI–education interaction is positive in Sub-Saharan Africa but reverses sign in Latin America and Asia — a cross-regional pattern consistent with a skill-matching mechanism. The Anglophone–Francophone colonial split within SSA is exploited as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the institutional channels through which this complementarity materialises. Contents data/ — Panel dataset covering 115 economies, 1970–2023, sourced from World Development Indicators (World Bank), IMF International Financial Statistics, and UNESCO Institute for Statistics code/ — Stata do-files for all estimations: PMG/DFE (xtpmg), IV (xtivreg2), System GMM (xtabond2), and Hansen PTR threshold regressions (xthreg) tables/ — Replication output tables corresponding to all results reported in the manuscript instruments/ — Construction of Bartik shift-share instruments using Federal Funds Rate (FEDFUNDS) and Primary Commodity Price Index (PCOM_Index) Software Stata (version 17 or later). Required user-written packages: xtpmg, xtivreg2, xtabond2, xthreg. Install via SSC before running do-files. How to Cite Botsyoe, P. (2025). Replication Data for: Education Spending and the FDI–Growth Nexus: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20101520 Keywords FDI; education expenditure; economic growth; absorptive capacity; Pooled Mean Group; System GMM; Sub-Saharan Africa; Latin America; Asia; colonial institutions; skill-matching