Out of Pocket Education Expenditure and Household Budget: Evidence from Arab Countries

The paper attempts to present a comparative study for patterns of household expenditure on education using different groups of population. The paper based its empirics on cross sectional evidence from four countries employing Harmonized Household Income and expenditure surveys. The datasets used are 2010/2011 round of the HHIES of Egypt, Jordan and Palestine and 2009 round for Sudan. The paper aims to examine the determinants of family spending on education on one hand and the magnitude of household spending on schooling using different population groups. The paper finds a degree of consistency in the patterns of spending on education across countries. We find that households in lower social strata are found to spend more on educating their children’s at all educational level with exception in Egypt, where wealthier household are found to spend more on children’s education. Moreover, Parental education and household income have a great influence on the magnitude of household spending on education. Household living in center provinces are more likely to spend more on children’s schooling except Sudan. With respect to demographic burden, households with children at primary schooling children are likely to spend less on education, while households with children at secondary and tertiary level of schooling are willing to spend more on education with except in Egypt at tertiary level. Egypt is the only country where free education policy is extended to university students. Despite, all Arab governments are adopting free education policy at elementary level, households still spend considerable amount of their household income on acquiring education, which is expected to be funded by government. Coefficients of elasticity’s show that both Sudan and Palestine considered spending on education is a necessity component in the household budget, while in Egypt, households at top income quintiles had the largest spending on education and Jordan is estimated to have unitary elasticity.