Abstract
This study empirically analysed the macroeconomic linkages between public education funding and tertiary school enrolment in Nigeria from 2000 to 2019. The study examined the trends in public education funding and tertiary school enrolment and assessed the effects of public education funding, economic growth and inflation on tertiary school enrolment. Annual secondary data were obtained from published sources, with tertiary school enrolment data sourced from UNESCO Institute for Statistics, while public education expenditure was derived from government recurrent expenditure on education relative to real gross domestic product. Gross domestic product growth and inflation were included as control variables. This study is primarily anchored on Human Capital Theory, supported by Public Expenditure Theory. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and time series econometric techniques were employed. Preliminary ordinary least squares estimation indicated a positive relationship between public education funding and tertiary school enrolment. However, diagnostic tests revealed serial correlation and heteroskedasticity, making conventional OLS inference unreliable. Heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent estimation, first difference analysis and a parsimonious dynamic model were therefore applied. The corrected results showed that public education funding remained positively associated with tertiary school enrolment but was not statistically significant at the 5 percent level. Economic growth and inflation were also statistically insignificant. The study concluded that increased public education funding alone did not provide a statistically robust explanation of changes in tertiary school enrolment during the study period.
Keywords: Macro-economics, Linkages, Public Funding, Tertiary Education, Autocorrelation.
Author name(s):
Opawoye Florence Lisette
Department of Business Administration, Miva Open University
Lawal Oreoluwa Qudus
(Doctoral Candidate) Department of Economics, Bells University of Technology, Ota, OgunState
DOI link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23152029
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.