Public Education Spending and Economic Growth: The Governance Threshold Effect

This paper aims to give reason to the mixed result between the public education spending and growth found largely by the empirical works and to confirm the nonlinear character of this relationship. Using cross countries data averaged during the period 1980-2013, and the structural threshold regression method STR (Kourtellos et al,. 2015) to investigate the heterogeneous effects of the public education spending on growth considering governance indicators as threshold variable, we obtain evidence that this expenditure contributes positively to the economic performance only if the country is above the threshold level and presents good governance otherwise the effect is negative.