Transformative role of educational funding in shaping national development across SAARC countries in the 21st century: A panel NARDL approach

Since the beginning of this century, there has been evidence of a rise in educational funding among the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). However, there has been a decline in recent years despite South Asia being a highly populated and poverty-ridden region. Thus, the present study comes to assess how well the countries are doing in relation to the effect of educational funding on national development indicators, namely economic growth, human capital development, and the unemployment rate among the SAARC countries in the 21st century using Panel Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (PNARDL) model formulated in Salisu and Isah (2017). The findings revealed that the impact of educational funding on economic growth and the unemployment rate is an asymmetry in the long run and symmetry in the short run but on the human development index, it is an asymmetry in both terms. However, educational funding is influencing economic growth in the long run, but in the short run is not. Furthermore, educational funding influences human capital development in both terms, but in the long run is negligible. Moreover, educational funding is negligibly discouraging the unemployment rate in both terms.