Abstract:

Researches have shown that there is a positive relationship between the education level of individuals and the income they earn. Therefore, states, by investing in increasing the education level of individuals, will be able to establish sustainable development and social welfare as a result of a more equal distribution of income in their countries in a long perspective. The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of public education expenditures on income inequality by applying panel cointegration analysis and then regression analysis with FMOLS and DOLS methods to the data from 14 OECD member countries, between 2003 and 2019 years. In the study, first in the light of the data, the expenditures per student and the average schooling time indicators of the countries were interpreted. The education expenditures of the countries were stratified as those for primary, secondary and higher education, and their effects on income inequality were tried to be measured separately. In the long term, it has been determined that public education expenditures for primary education have an effect on reducing income distribution inequality, while expenditures on secondary education have an effect on increasing income distribution, and as a result of the analysis, it has been found that higher education public expenditures do not have a statistically significant effect on the Gini Coefficient for the sample.

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