| This dissertation presents a unified redistributive theory of public education spending. The project develops a formal model of the cross-cutting redistributive forces that determine political preferences over education and develops from these a series of hypotheses about the key determinants of national education policy, which are then tested using statistical techniques and case histories. In particular, three critical factors are highlighted: a state's regime type its openness to the international economy and partisan control of government within the state.Since wealthy individuals dislike education spending because of its negative fiscal, scarcity, and lottery effects on their children's income, regime transition to democracy should be associated with higher education spending. Since the scarcity effects of expanding education are weaker in highly open states, a state's degree of openness to the international economy should also be positively associated with education spending. Finally, left-wing governments are associated with higher levels of education spending, both absolutely and relative to other government spending but this relationship is much weaker in states with proportional electoral systems.The dissertation also examines the composition of education spending, noting that wealthy individuals have an incentive to promote spending on higher education at the expense of primary education. These hypotheses are tested on a variety of cross-national panel datasets, both within and outside the OECD group of wealthy countries, using several econometric techniques. Furthermore, the mechanisms suggested in the dissertation are tested in case histories of the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. |
