Public Education Expenditure and Female Educational Exclusion in Pakistan: Does Digital Connectivity Enhance Spending Effectiveness?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62843/jssr.v6i3.781Keywords:
Public Education Expenditure, Female Educational Exclusion, Digital Connectivity, Gender Inequality, ARDL, PakistanAbstract
This study examines whether budgetary priority for public education is associated with lower female educational exclusion in Pakistan and whether digital connectivity strengthens this relationship. Female exclusion is measured through a Female Enrolment Deficit (FED) for middle-stage schooling, constructed from total and female enrolment reported in the Pakistan Economic Survey. Public education expenditure is measured as education spending as a share of total government expenditure, while digital connectivity is proxied by mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people. EDU and DIG are mean centred before constructing the interaction term. Using annual data for 2000-2025, three nested autoregressive distributed lag models estimate the baseline spending relationship, the direct association of digital connectivity, and the proposed moderation effect. Bounds tests support a long-run levels relationship in all three specifications. Education expenditure is negatively associated with FED across the long-run models and is statistically significant in Models 1 and 3. Digital connectivity is also negative and statistically significant in Models 2 and 3. The EDU × DIG interaction is negative and marginally significant in the long run (p = 0.0505) and weakly significant in the short run (p = 0.085). The findings indicate that education budget priority and digital connectivity are associated with lower female enrolment disparities, while evidence that connectivity strengthens the effect of education spending remains tentative. Given the short national time series and residual serial correlation in Model 2, the estimates are interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects.
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