Bridging Digital Readiness and Educational Inclusion: The Causal Impact of OER Policies on SDG4 Outcomes

This study examines the relationship between national open educational resource (OER) policies and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) outcomes across 187 countries between 2015 and 2024, with particular attention to the moderating role of artificial intelligence (AI) readiness. Despite widespread optimism about digital technologies as catalysts for universal education, systematic evidence linking formal OER policy frameworks to measurable improvements in educational access and completion remains limited. The analysis employs fixed effects and difference-in-differences estimation strategies using an unbalanced panel dataset comprising 435 country-year observations. The research investigates how OER policies associate with primary completion rates and out-of-school rates while testing whether these relationships depend on countries’ technological and institutional capacity for advanced technology deployment. The findings reveal that AI readiness demonstrates consistent positive associations with educational outcomes, with a ten-point increase in the readiness index corresponding to approximately 0.46 percentage point improvements in primary completion rates and 0.31 percentage point reductions in out-of-school rates across fixed effects specifications. The difference-in-differences analysis indicates that OER-adopting countries experienced completion rate increases averaging 0.52 percentage points relative to non-adopting countries in the post-2020 period, though this estimate remains statistically imprecise ( p equals 0.440), preventing definitive causal conclusions. Interaction effects between policies and readiness yield consistently positive coefficients across specifications, but these associations similarly fail to achieve conventional significance thresholds given sample size constraints and limited within-country variation. While the directional patterns align with theoretical expectations that policy effectiveness depends on digital capacity, the evidence should be characterized as suggestive rather than conclusive. These findings represent preliminary assessment of policies in early implementation stages. Most frameworks were adopted between 2019 and 2022, providing observation windows of two to five years before data collection ended in 2024. This timeline proves insufficient for educational system transformations to fully materialize in aggregate indicators, as primary education cycles span six to eight years and implementation processes operate gradually through sequential stages of content development, teacher training, and institutional adaptation. The analysis captures policy impacts during formation rather than at equilibrium, establishing baseline patterns that require extended longitudinal observation for definitive evaluation. High-income countries demonstrate interaction coefficients between policies and readiness that approach marginal statistical significance ( p less than 0.10), while low-income subsamples show coefficients near zero with wide confidence intervals. These patterns suggest that OER frameworks function as complementary interventions whose effectiveness depends critically on enabling infrastructure including digital connectivity, governance quality, technical workforce capacity, and innovation ecosystems. The results carry important implications for how countries sequence educational technology reforms and how international development organizations design technical assistance programs. The evidence cautions against uniform policy recommendations across diverse contexts, indicating that countries at different stages of digital development require fundamentally different strategies that coordinate policy adoption with foundational capacity building. However, the modest short-term effects and statistical imprecision observed here should not be interpreted as evidence of policy ineffectiveness, but rather as confirmation that immediate transformation is unlikely given implementation complexities and temporal constraints. The study contributes systematic cross-national evidence on aggregate policy associations while highlighting the conditional nature of educational technology effectiveness and establishing the need for continued longitudinal research as policies mature beyond the early implementation phase captured in this analysis.