Interrogating the drivers of budget credibility dynamics in Ghana’s education sector through the lens of unmitigated spending credibility crisis discourses

In recent times, attention has been paid to the spending credibility given its role in the determination of functioning capacity of budgets and their implementation. This global interest in spending credibility has been engaged using Ghana’s low education spending credibility, occasioned by observations of large deviations in planned and executed education budgets. Informed by the economic uncertainty principle within the context of operating a balanced budget, we provide novel insights into the extent and drivers of education spending credibility dynamics in Ghana during 2005-2022. We do so by leveraging the potential of multivariate time series based on autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, augmented by fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and descriptive trend analysis. Our analyses of the extent of spending credibility in Ghana’s education sector reveal overspending of overall education budget as well as salary and non-salary budgets by 23.06%, 26.26%, and 517.60% on average, respectively. This depicts low performance on overall and compositional education spending credibility, which is robustly driven by variances in domestic-financed budgetary allocations per our ARDL long and short run analyses. The robustness of the ARDL estimated long-term coefficients is supported by the FMOLS. The paper, therefore, underscores increased pressure on domestic education funding sources, suggesting the need to adopt policies to diversify current revenue streams.