| Summary: | Understanding the determinants of regional economic disparities is very important for designing an effective policy framework to address regional inequalities and their disruptive potentials.The role of educational attainment in the regional income determination has been well documented in the economic literature.So far, little attention was given to the importance of educational distribution in regional income determination.To contribute in this respect, this paper developed a regional production function model that incorporates education inequality as a determinant of regional income disparity in Nigeria. Using micro data from the recent Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS) on Nigeria, we calculate inequality of education using Theil index.Using a cross-sectional spatial econometric approach, we found evidence that equitable distribution of education has significant and
positive effects on regional income level. Interestingly, the measure of the education distribution outperforms that of educational attainment in the model.The results also confirm the role of education inequality in accounting for regional income differences in Nigeria.We conclude that investing for equitable distribution of education will be very effective policy strategy, both for improving regional economic performance and regional economic convergence in Nigeria.
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