Household Schooling Decisions in Rural Pakistan
Human capital investments in Pakistan are performing poorly; school enrollment is low, the high school dropout rate is high, and there is a definite gender gap in education. The authors conducted field surveys in 25 Pakistani villages and integrate...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2001/02/1000494/household-schooling-decisions-rural-pakistan http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15745 |
| Summary: | Human capital investments in Pakistan
are performing poorly; school enrollment is low, the high
school dropout rate is high, and there is a definite gender
gap in education. The authors conducted field surveys in 25
Pakistani villages and integrated their field observations,
economic theory, and econometric analysis to investigate the
sequential nature of education decisions--because current
outcomes depend not only on current decisions but also on
past decisions. Their full-information maximum likelihood
estimate of the sequential schooling decision model reveals
important dynamics affecting the gender gap in education,
the effects of transitory income and wealth, and
intrahousehold resource allocation patterns. They find,
among other things, that in rural Pakistan: 1) There is a
high educational retention rate, conditional on school
entry, and that male and female schooling progression rates
become comparable at higher levels of education. 2) A
household's human and physical assets and changes in
its income significantly affect children's education
patterns. Birth order affects siblings' competition for
resources. 3) Serious supply-side constraints on village
girls' primary education suggest the importance of
supply-side policy interventions in Pakistan's rural
primary education--for example, providing more girls'
primary schools close to villages and employing more female teachers. |
|---|