Abstract There was much euphoria and enthusiasm surrounding the advent of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, but there was little empirical evidence regarding how much would be required of countries to achieve the goals. This article contributes to filling this gap by estimating what Ghana needs in fiscal terms to achieve SDG 4: Quality Education. The article estimated an education gap, which indicates the difference between what pertains to education indicators in Ghana and what SDG 4 sets to achieve. Further, the fiscal capacity needed to address the gap was estimated while taking cognisance of the nation’s education budget and fiscal space from tax revenues. The results indicated that Ghana is inefficient in its allocation of education resources. While the top-performing countries are, on average, spending less (4.18%) of their gross domestic product (GDP) on education and achieving more, Ghana is spending more (6.16%) of its GDP on education but achieving less. Thus, Ghana faces more of an allocation and efficiency challenge contrary to a resource challenge to attain SDG 4. Provided the nation wants to maintain its inefficiency track, it will need to allocate an additional 0.58 per cent of its GDP to education to boost its educational performance to the level of the top-performing countries.

中文翻译：

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加纳能否负担教育方面的可持续发展目标？

摘要2015年，有关17个可持续发展目标（SDG）的问世引起了极大的欣喜和热情，但很少有经验证据表明各国要实现这些目标需要多少资金。本文通过估算加纳实现SDG 4：素质教育所需的财政条件，为填补这一空白做出了贡献。该文章估计了教育差距，这表明加纳的教育指标与可持续发展目标4设定的目标之间存在差异。此外，在从税收中了解国家教育预算和财政空间的同时，估计了解决这一差距所需的财政能力。结果表明，加纳在分配教育资源方面效率低下。虽然表现最佳的国家平均花费较少（4。加纳国内生产总值（GDP）的18％用于教育和取得更多成就，加纳在教育方面的支出占GDP的比重更高（6.16％），但取得的成就却更少。因此，加纳面临更多的分配和效率挑战，而与实现可持续发展目标4的资源挑战相反。如果该国想保持其低效率的轨道，它将需要将其GDP的0.58％额外分配给教育以促进其教育发展。表现达到最佳国家/地区的水平。