Three essays on financing education: exploring the role of the government and the private sector

Abstract

The role of improved schooling has become controversial because expansion of school investment has not guaranteed improved educational outcomes. This thesis pays attention to why government investments in education have not produced the desire effects of increased educational attainment and higher enrolment rate. We show that the results depend on the methodology. We also provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of the economic benefits of effective school policy: we find that, countries that improved their cognitive skill, through different facets of school choice, autonomy and accountability over time experienced relative increases in their growth paths. We show that quality of education significantly matter for technological progress and that it is a source of divergence in OECD economies. We also analyse in a dispassionate way, voters influence on public policy especially, that pertaining to public school resource allocation, in one country India we take India because the country’s overall success story hides striking inter- and intra-state variation in literacy rates. There is suggestion that larger districts with more elected legislators and also districts with higher voter turnout benefit from greater allocation of public school resources, which in turn are expected to boost schooling outcomes. In other words, these results highlight the power of democracy in ensuring a better allocation of public school resources in our sample.