Relationship between oil revenues and education in gulf cooperation council countries

Abstract

Education is one of the basic components of human capital. Political authorities try to increase their economic growth performances by increasing education expenditures. However, in many resource-rich countries, it is observed that the governments are not sensitive about education and that the education indicators are not very good. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between oil revenues and education by using the data of four oil exporting Gulf Cooperation Council member countries for the period between 2001 and 2017. The total number of students enrolled in post-secondary education, general programs, general and private high school education institutions were selected as the indicators of education. Since there was no cross sectional dependence, panel ARDL (PMG) and group mean DOLS tests that do not consider cross sectional dependence but consider heterogeneous cross-sections were used in this study. It was observed that there was a negative relationship between oil revenues and educational level for the relevant group of countries in the long term. According to this result, it was concluded that there was no strong awareness of the importance of education in the countries those are included in the analysis, and that the resources were not sufficiently transferred to the increase of human capital power. © 2019, Econjournals. All rights reserved.