Measuring and Analyzing the Impact of Government Public Spending on Higher Education and Its Role in Achieving Sustainable Development in Iraq for the Period (2003-2020)

Higher education institutions, especially universities, are an intellectual and scientific cultural center. The function of these institutions lies in behavioral and scientific aspects, such as building generations and developing scientific and cultural awareness in society, as higher education represents the most important pillars of the development of human societies and tools for their advancement due to the position it occupies in creating and preparing the technical and scientific frameworks qualified to achieve economic and social development. Developing and developed countries devote special efforts to supporting and developing the education sector, including Iraq, which gave increasing interest in the education sector, especially after 2003. This interest is attributed to the Iraqi government’s awareness that the reason for the country’s weak economic performance is the lack of cadres and levels of skilled labor that keep pace with the developments taking place. The world has led to a technological and knowledge gap with the developed world, and in order to achieve the process of sustainable development, education must be developed and expanded in its various stages and types, as it is the main source for providing the needs of the economic development sectors and supplying them with labor to implement sustainable development plans and in order to raise the educational level. Spending on the education sector must be increased to confront the rapid population growth, which leads to increased demand for educational services, which are among the rights guaranteed by the state to every individual, in addition to the need of developing countries, including Iraq, for specialized technical staff. The main problem for those countries is the role of education in achieving development in general and whether spending on education constitutes a burden on the sustainable development process in Iraq in particular. The results of the research indicated that there is a weakness in the process of government spending on higher education in Iraq, as the results showed research shows that the time series for the two variables are stable to the same degree; that is, there is a cointegration relationship between general government spending and spending on education, and the results were consistent with economic theory, as the relationship was positive and significant.