Sustainable Development Goal 4: Does Government Expenditure Contribute Significantly

Abstract

Government spending is the amount of money that the public sector spends on the purchase of products and the delivery of services including defence, social protection, healthcare, and education. The present study tries to find out how countries are spending on education to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4. The study analyses government expenditures on education made by selected economies to achieve SDG 4 from 2020 to 2022. The analysis is based on the secondary data collected from the Division for Sustainable Development Goals (DSDG) in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) on 1 April 2023. The 10 largest economies have been selected for the analysis. One-way analysis of variance has been used to see the statistical significance difference in expenditure among the countries and for different time periods. The analysis shows that government expenditures as percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) is highest in France and lowest in China, Macao Special Administrative Region. While making comparisons among the selected economies all the countries are significantly different in the expenditure for education. The result also concludes that during the last three years the government expenditure did not change, indeed, it decreased over the period of time. One of the potential reasons could be the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–22 when governments could not make significant contributions to improve education.

Keywords: SDG 4, Education, Expenditure, Countries

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