Public education expenditure and educational outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa: the conditioning role of institutional quality

Purpose This study examines the association between public education expenditure and educational outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and whether this relationship varies across the dimensions of institutional quality. Design/methodology/approach The study uses an unbalanced panel of 19 SSA countries from 2010 to 2023. Two-way fixed-effects models estimate within-country associations between public education expenditure and primary completion and secondary enrolment. Institutional conditioning is examined separately for the six Worldwide Governance Indicators. Country-clustered standard errors and wild-cluster-bootstrap inference address the limited number of country clusters. Findings Public education expenditure has a positive but statistically weak association with primary completion and no statistically distinguishable association with secondary enrolment. None of the six governance dimensions significantly moderates the expenditure-primary completion relationship at the 5% level. For secondary enrolment, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, and rule of law exhibit negative and conventionally significant interactions with expenditure. These interactions indicate that the expenditure-enrolment association weakens as these governance indicators increase, rather than that stronger governance reduces enrolment. Research limitations/implications The estimates identify conditional associations rather than causal effects, and aggregate expenditure and national governance indicators cannot capture program-level allocation or education sector governance. Practical implications Education financing should target stage-specific constraints and link additional allocations to intended educational outcomes rather than relying on aggregate expenditure. Originality/value This study distinguishes six governance dimensions and demonstrates that the institutional conditioning of educational expenditure is outcome-specific across educational stages.