The Pathway to Improving Human and Economic Development: Girls' Secondary Education, Governance, and Education Expenditures

An extensive field of research identifies girls' secondary education as central to improving human and economic development. Despite improvements in girls' secondary education enrollment, there are still over 34 million female adolescents out of school—the majority in developing nations. While gender equity in education has improved, girls still lag behind boys in secondary education enrollments. Building on existing research, we argue that the failures of education spending in creating equitable access to secondary education are due to a lack of governance. We contend that strong governance has the potential to increase the effectiveness of education expenditures at improving female secondary education relative to males. Using two-way fixed effects models for a sample of 105 low and middle-income nations from 1997 to 2012, we examine how the interaction between four measures of governance and education expenditures impact gender equity in secondary education. Our findings suggest that governance increases the effectiveness of education expenditures in improving girls' secondary education enrollment compared to males.