The Impact of Higher Education Funding on Socio-Economic Variables: Evidence from EU Countries

Education is an important vector of smart growth, sustainable development, and economic competitiveness. Higher education plays an important catalytic role in human capital development, and ensures a better insertion of individuals in the socio-economic environment. However, at present, it faces complex challenges in the context of public financing contraction. The aim of our article is to investigate the level of higher education funding and to reveal the impact it has on the socio-economic environment. The novelty of our article resides in the multifaceted analysis we propose combining both qualitative and empirical methods, in the comprehensive sample of EU countries, and in the large time horizon we consider. We first assess the relationship between public financial resources allocated to higher education and socio-economic indicators by means of an exploratory technique, called cluster analysis. Our findings reveal a pattern of similarity among EU countries by building smaller but homogenous groups. We then use the vector autoregressive method to complement the cluster analysis by providing further information on the strength, sign, and causal relationship between government expenditure in tertiary education and several socio-economic indicators. We perform an analysis for each country in the sample. Our findings are mixed, with some countries displaying a greater sensitivity of public financing (channeled to higher education) to changes in socio-economic indicators.