Causality Relationship Between Agricultural Education and Poverty in Egypt

Education is a basic human right. The fourth goal of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals emphasized “ensuring equitable and inclusive quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Poverty is considered one of the most important obstacles to development in general, and economic and social development. It can be said that the basis for the formation of poor societies is the lack of education, so the first goal emphasized "no poverty". The agriculture can contribute to poverty reduction beyond the direct impact on farmers' income, and that the agricultural sector contributes to reducing rural poverty and unemployment. The research mainly aims to identify the role of education in reducing poverty in the Egyptian agricultural sector, by studying the relationship between education, poverty, and economic growth in the short term (SR) and long term (LR) in the Egyptian agricultural sector, and to determine the causal relationship between education, poverty, and economic growth in the Egyptian agricultural sector. The research was based on annual data in the form of time series covering the period 1990-2019.
The results of multiple regression model in the double logarithmic form after taking the first differences of the variables to be stationary, showed that the variables affecting the number of poor people in rural Egypt at the national poverty line are: Total agricultural education graduates, agricultural GDP at constant prices (as an indicator of growth in output Agricultural local), expenditure on agricultural education at fixed prices, total agricultural investment at fixed prices, human development index or index “%”, and that all independent variables included in the model have an adverse effect on the dependent variable, and that together they explain about 92.19% of the changes in the number of The poor in rural Egypt are at the national poverty line, which indicates the need to increase agricultural investments and pay attention to the human element in this sector. The co-integration test showed that there is evidence of the possibility of a long-term equilibrium relationship between poverty in rural Egypt at the national poverty line and the independent variables affecting it, which means that these variables do not move away from each other in the long term. It was also possible to arrange the "strongest" independent variables in explaining the variation in the dependent variable over time as follows: agricultural GDP (growth in the agricultural sector), total agricultural education graduates, expenditure on agricultural education, human development index, and total agricultural investment.
The results of the Granger Causality test indicated that there is a one-way causal relationship that goes from rural poverty to total agricultural education graduates, and the existence of a two-way causal relationship between rural poverty and economic growth in the agricultural sector, meaning that each causes the other. Also, there is a one-way causal relationship that goes from expenditure on agricultural education to reducing rural poverty, from agricultural investment to reducing rural poverty, and from human development to reducing rural poverty. In other words, the increase in expenditure on agricultural education, agricultural investment and the human development index causes a decrease in the number of poor people in rural Egypt. These results agree with the results of some previous studies, including the studies of Afzal et. al., (2012), Ahmad and Batul (2013), and Al-Hawij (2020). These results also confirm the verification of the research hypotheses.