The role of government spending in the education sector on the productivity of the labor element – the Iraqi economy – a case study

A letter submitted to the Council of the College of Administration and Economics / University of Karbala, which is part of the requirements for obtaining a master’s degree in economic sciences

Submitted by student

 Zainab Abdul Hassan Al-Saadi

Supervising by

Prof . Dr .
Salam Kazem Shani AL-Fatlawi

ABSTRACT

      We note that despite the vital role played by spending on education in raising the level of human development in developed countries as a result of the role that these countries attach to it, we see developing countries, especially Iraq, did not benefit from the financial potential and economic resources it possesses in advancing the reality of the educational sector by increasing investment in education. The percentage of government expenditures allocated to education during the research period (2004-2022) is low, that is, the educational sector enjoys a low percentage of the general budget allocations that are not commensurate with the vital importance of this sector, so the research aimed to study the role of government spending on the education sector in the productivity of the labor element in Iraq for the period 2004-2022, The problem of the research was that there is a large gap between the actual skills of education outputs and the skills required by the labor market and the weak role of the government and its inefficient management of economic resources while achieving one of the most important goals of human development, which is the education sector, it was giving the education sector a secondary role in its development policy, unlike other countries, the financial allocations to the education sector as a percentage of total public expenditure were low and did not meet the aspirations of advancing the development reality. While the hypothesis of the research was launched in that the education sector plays a major role in achieving development goals in Iraq, so the increase in government spending in the education sector affects the productivity of the labor element. The research acquires its importance from the standpoint that the issue of spending on education is among the best investments in raising the rate of productivity of the labor element, which in turn leads to economic and social development, so it is necessary to work to increase the efficiency of spending and to know the problems faced by Iraq in particular. In order to study the subject and achieve the goal and test the validity of the hypothesis, the deductive approach was adopted through the descriptive method in analyzing the theoretical side in order to give a theoretical background on the variables, while on the applied side, the quantitative method was adopted using the standard model to study the relationship between the variables and reach the most important conclusions, which is that there is a clear decrease in the volume of spending on education as a percentage of GDP as well as government expenditure despite the size of absolute spending during the period of In order to activate the role of spending on education in the educational institution, we recommend increasing the financial allocations directed to the educational sector from the size of the general budget and from the volume of government expenditures.

Keywords: government spending, government spending on education, labor element productivity