Title: Pre-university education outputs in Egypt: does money matter?

Authors: Israa A. El Husseiny; Khaled Zakaria Amin

Addresses: Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt ' The Center of Macroeconomic Policies, Institute of National Planning, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract: The effect of school resources on education outputs has always been a debatable question. While supporters of the 'money matters' argument could find a significant relationship between the school resources and student's achievement, proponents of the 'money does not matter' argument could not. In this context, the current study aims at verifying empirically the hypothesis that the more the school resources of the public pre-university education system at the local level in Egypt, the higher will be the education performance at the same level. Using a panel dataset that covers 270 observations (27 governorates over the time period between fiscal years 2004/2005 and 2013/2014), this study finds a very little positive impact of per-student public expenditure on the student achievement, as measured by the graduation rate, at the preparatory educational level. In addition, this impact tends to be smaller for the governorates with a relatively high level of human development. The other school resources variables of pupil-teacher ratio, class size, and teachers' qualifications proved to have different effects on the student achievement by educational level.

Keywords: pre-university education; Egypt; education production functions; education finance; education resources; education outputs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEED.2018.094279

International Journal of Education Economics and Development, 2018 Vol.9 No.3, pp.210 - 235

Received: 18 Oct 2017
Accepted: 10 Apr 2018
Published online: 26 Aug 2018 *

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