Public expenditure on education, educational attainment and unemployment nexus in India: an empirical investigation.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nexus among public expenditure allocated to education, educational attainment at secondary level and unemployment rate in India for the period 1987–2017. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) bound testing approach suggested by Pesaran et al. (2001) to find the long-run relationship among the variables. The causal linkages are investigated through block exogeneity test based on vector error correction model. Findings: The empirical results indicate that educational attainment proxied by gross enrolment ratio at secondary level of education negatively affects unemployment rate in long run as well as in short run. However, public expenditure on education is ineffective in influencing both educational attainment and unemployment rate. Originality/value: The study is the first empirical effort to identify the causal nexus among public expenditure on education, educational attainment and unemployment in the context of India. Peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2019-0396 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]