Monazza Aslam

Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan

Pakistan has very large gender gaps in educational outcomes. One explanation could be that girls receive lower educational expenditure allocations than boys within the household, but this has never convincingly been tested. This article investigates whether the intra-household allocation of educational expenditure in Pakistan favours males over females. It also explores two different explanations for the failure of the extant ‘Engel curve’ studies to detect gender-differentiated treatment in education even where gender bias is strongly expected. Using individual level data from the latest household survey from Pakistan, we posit two potential channels of gender bias: bias in the decision whether to enrol/keep sons and daughters in school, and bias in the decision of education expenditure conditional on enrolling both sons and daughters in school. In middle and secondary school ages, evidence points to significant pro-male biases in both the enrolment decision as well as the decision of how much to spend conditional on enrolment. However, in the primary school age-group, only the former channel of bias applies. Results suggest that the observed strong gender difference in education expenditure is a within rather than an across household phenomenon.

The Relative Effectiveness of Government and Private Schools in Pakistan: Are Girls Worse Off?

Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro‐male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions. Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school‐type choice for the two sexes; for example, through a greater likelihood of sending boys to fee‐charging private schools? And, if indeed this is the case, are girls thereby condemned to lower quality schooling, on average, than boys? By asking these questions, this paper makes three contributions to the literature. Firstly, this is one of a very few studies in Pakistan to explore the question of the relative effectiveness of public and private schools despite there being an unprecedented expansion of fee‐charging private schools in the past two decades. Secondly, unlike existing papers that focus on primary schooling, this study looks at potential learning gaps by school type for students in their last year of middle school (Grade Eight), very near their transition to secondary schooling. Thirdly, it exploits unique, purposively‐collected data from government and private school students, and thus, in estimating achievement production functions, is able to control for a number of variables typically ‘unobserved’ by researchers. The findings reveal that boys are indeed more likely to be sent to private schools than girls within the household, so that differential school‐type choice is an important channel of differential treatment against girls. Private schools are also found to be of better quality – they are more effective than government schools in imparting mathematics and literacy skills. Girls lose out vis‐à‐vis boys in terms not only of lower within‐household educational expenditures, but also in terms of the quality of schooling accessed.

Returns to schooling, ability and cognitive skills in Pakistan

This study investigates the economic outcomes of education for wage earners in Pakistan. This is done by analysing the relationship between schooling, cognitive skills and ability, on the one hand, and economic activity, occupation, sectoral choice and earnings, on the other. In Pakistan, an important question remains largely unaddressed: what does the coefficient on ‘schooling’ in conventional earning function estimates measure? Whereas human capital theory holds that the economic return to an extra year of schooling measures productivity gains acquired through additional schooling, the credentialist view argues that it represents a return to acquired qualifications and credentials, and a third view, the signalling hypothesis, suggests that it captures a return to native ability. This paper seeks to adjudicate between these theories using data from a unique purpose-designed survey of more than 1000 households in Pakistan, collected in 2007. The paper also examines the shape of the education–earnings relationship in Pakistan as a way of testing the poverty-reducing potential of education in Pakistan.

Can Education Be a Path to Gender Equality in the Labour Market? An Update on Pakistan.

This paper investigates some of the economic outcomes of education in Pakistan with a view to understanding if education can act as a vehicle for labour market success. Data from a purpose-designed survey of more than 1000 households in Pakistan are utilised. Earnings functions are estimated for agricultural workers, the self-employed and wage earners to estimate the returns to the ‘quantity’ and the ‘quality’ of schooling in different occupations, by gender. The paper also estimates the returns to knowing ‘English’ in the Pakistani labour market separately for men and women.

School enrolment and learning outcomes for children with disabilities: findings from a household survey in Pakistan

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings from household data collected as part of the Annual Survey of Education conducted in rural Punjab in 2015, which included questions on disability developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics. Data reported here focuses on the disability status of children aged 5 to 16 years, their access to school and learning outcomes on basic reading and maths tasks. Our findings highlight that children who were identified by their carer/mothers as having moderate to severe disabilities were less likely to be attending school and had lower levels of learning on basic reading and maths tasks, than their peers who were not identified as having any difficulties in functioning. More importantly, our findings also suggest that being a co-resident/sibling in a household with a child with moderate to severe disabilities was associated with lower levels of basic reading and numeracy for the co-residents/siblings compared to other children. We conclude by highlighting important policy considerations and identifying areas of future research.