Children’s education, adult schooling, and household wealth in Arunachal Pradesh: An Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach

This study examines the relationship between education and household wealth in Arunachal Pradesh from 1992 to 2022 by analyzing the effects of children’s educational attendance and adults’ mean years of education on the Mean International Wealth Index. Using annual time-series data from the Global Data Lab Area Database, the study applies the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to assess short-run dynamics and long-run association among the variables. The empirical results indicate that adult educational attainment is positively and significantly associated with household wealth, suggesting that accumulated adult human capital plays an important role in wealth generation in the state. Children’s educational attendance shows a negative contemporaneous effect but a positive lagged effect, implying that schooling may impose short-run resource pressures on households while generating longer-term economic benefits. The bounds test provides evidence of a long-run relationship among the variables; however, the positive and statistically significant error correction term in the restricted error-correction model suggests that the standard convergence pattern is not observed in the current specification. The findings therefore support a dynamic education–wealth relationship, but the adjustment mechanism should be interpreted cautiously. Overall, the study contributes to the limited literature on the education–wealth nexus in Arunachal Pradesh and highlights the importance of sustained investment in both child and adult education for long-term socioeconomic development.