Assessing the spatial impact of educational attainment on poverty reduction in Thailand

ABSTRACT

Using a novel subnational-level dataset of Thailand, the results show a strong spatial association between poverty and educational attainment in Thailand. Provinces with more educated populations are more likely to have lower poverty incidence. In particular, the findings of this study suggest that attainment of tertiary education can significantly affect poverty reduction, while the negligible effects of primary and secondary education could be due to the disparities in education quality. Therefore, the 9-year compulsory education provided by the Thai government might no longer be enough to reduce poverty, and tertiary education might play a more critical role in poverty alleviation.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• poverty reduction
• spatial regression
• spatial dependence
• Thailand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Educational Quality Index used in (Fry, Bi, and Apahung 2018) contained the following components: percent of adults with a college degree, percent of the labor force with a college degree, success in gaining admission to top national universities, average years of schooling, average scores on Ordinary National Educational Test (O-NET), and percent of schools with above passing O-NET scores.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chulalongkorn University (Chulalongkorn Economic Research Centre).