The effects of the socioeconomic, governance and political determinants of the local educational outcomes of provincial administrative organizations

Abstract

In the previous studies on the determinants of public expenditure and public policy outcomes, only socioeconomic and political factors are taken into account. This study, however, has shed new light on how governance factors affect local public expenditure and policy outcomes especially on local education. Provincial Administrative Organizations (PAO) is one of the local administrative organization types which is assigned to administrate education institutes or support education systems or to perform both functions. Therefore, it could play an important role in Thailand’s education provision. The underlying objectives of this study are to identify the main factors that affect PAO’s public expenditure on primary education, and to assess how PAO’s expenditure on education as well as socio-economic and governance variables affect PAO’s education outcomes and how PAO could help improve provincial education outcomes. Secondary data were collected and panel data analysis was used to assess the effects of the antecedents on PAO’s expenditure on education and the determinants of PAO’s education outcomes. The results reveal that PAO’s education expenditure is mainly negatively determined by the previous year’s GPP per capita. The previous year’s local revenue also increases the total education expenditure. Besides, social variables, number of schools and school age population have high impact on PAO’s educational expenditure while political variables; the poverty ratio and political continuity have a negative effect on PAO’s education expenditure and governance factors; PAO with governance qualification brings about higher levels of education expenditure. However, the corruption rate has a positive impact on education expenditure which indicates that it is needed to find solutions for solving PAO’s corruption in education. For determinants of PAO’s education outcomes; accessibility via the enrolment ratio; equality via literacy rate and average years of adult schooling; achievement via Grade 6’s average O-Net scores and Grade 6’s average GPA, all imply that both education expenditure and socio-economic status determine education outcomes. However, for the PAO’s case, education expenditure has a more significant effect on overall education outcomes than the other factors. Moreover, governance factors also have an important role in improving provincial and PAO’s education outcomes. Therefore, PAOs should be encouraged to take part in national education development as it could help improve inequality as well as achievement in education with its redistribution policy. Finally, from the results, the governance factor plays an important role in reducing educational disparity by increasing efficiency and effectiveness of PAOs’ educational spending and PAO’s educational management process.