Research Themes

Education

Rural Household Finance, Child Labor, and Education in Punjab

Researcher: Dr. Theresa Chaudhry (Lahore School of Economics) and Dr. Gwendolyn Tedeschi (Manhattan College)

Researchers will be looking at child outcomes (education and child labor) as they relate to microfinance borrowing, using data collected from 1000 households in 2013 through the Punjab Rural Household Survey (supported by the British Academy and Lahore School of Economics). They will also get a detailed picture of rural households' finances, including borrowing and savings behaviors, taking place through both formal and informal sources, including microfinance institutions, moneylenders, friends and family, and committees (ROSCAs).

Conditional-Cash Transfers for Girls' Secondary Schooling in Punjab: Outcomes

Researcher: Theresa Chaudhry (Lahore School) and Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University)

The government of Punjab, starting in 2003, offered a conditional cash transfer (CCT) of Rs 200 per month, to girls in class 6 to 8 with minimum 80 percent attendance, in order to increase the educational attainment of girls in districts with less than 40 percent literacy. The program was later was extended up to grade 10.

Using data collected a survey of rural households in Punjab (supported by the British Academy and Lahore School of Economics), Dr. Theresa Chaudhry and Anam Masood (Lahore School) are analyzing the impacts of the Female Secondary School Stipend Program (FSSSP), a component of Punjab Education Sector Reform Program (PERSP) on school enrollment, middle and high school completion, marriage and fertility outcomes for eligible girls in rural areas of stipend recipient districts.

This paper uses triple difference-in-difference analyses to show the effects of program after ten years of implementation. The relevant control groups in this study include elder sisters and/or cousins in stipend districts, girls of similar age, their elder sisters and/or cousins in non-stipend districts.

Girls exposed to the program were more likely to remain in school if we look at a short (2003-2006) or medium (2003-2009) span of time, but there was no statistically significant impact on completion of middle or high school. There is suggestive evidence that girls exposed to the program were more likely to be engaged in early marriages and subsequently are younger at the birth of first child.

These surprising findings will be explored further with the addition of a second household survey to the current sample.

Determinants of School Choice: Evidence from Rural Punjab, Pakistan

Researcher: Hamna Ahmed (Lahore School of Economics) and Sahar Amjad Sheikh (Lahore University of Management Sciences)

The objective of this study is to understand why parents in rural areas of Punjab, Pakistan, choose to send their children to private schools when free public schools are available. The study utilizes the Privatization in Education Research Initiative (PERI) school choice dataset compiled by the Lahore School of Economics in collaboration with the Punjab Bureau of Statistics. These data provide rich information on parents' perception of their child's school relative to alternative schools he or she could have attended. The findings suggest that parents' perceptions play an important role in school choice. In particular, their perceptions of school quality and employment opportunities emerge as key determinants of private school choice. Additionally, expenditure on and access to private schooling relative to public schooling as well as the socioeconomic status of the household have a significant impact on parents' probability of choosing a private school for their child.

Published Article:
The Lahore Journal of Economics, Volume 19: 1 (Summer 2014): pp. 1-30.

Education, Rent seeking and the Curse of Natural Resources

Researcher: Waqar Ahmed Wadho (Lahore School)

Recent empirical evidence suggests that relatively resource rich countries tend to have lower economic growth, higher corruption and lower level of education. In this article, we provide a theory behind this evidence where abundance of natural resources affects both corruption and education, which in turn determines the rate of growth. We have developed an endogenous growth model for an economy divided in two classes; the elite and workers. The former is a privileged class who has access to both education and the political process. Apart from the industrial sector, there is a natural resource sector that creates rents. The rents from natural resource sector accrue to the government, which attracts rent seeking. Profitable rent seeking requires time investment in political capital accumulation, which crowds out time invested in education.

Our predictions in this article are in line with the empirical findings that the natural resources curse operates through the crowding out of productive capital and rent seeking. Furthermore, the relationship between abundance of natural resource and the resource curse is non-monotonic. We find that depending on the natural resource endowments, there can be three different growth regimes. There are endogenous thresholds of natural resource endowments that demarcate different equilibria. For low endowment of natural resources, there is a unique high-growth equilibrium with faster growth, higher education attainment, and no corruption, while for high endowment of natural resources, there is a unique poverty-trap equilibrium with no growth, no education attainment and very high corruption. In the intermediate ranges, there are multiple equilibria.

The thresholds are endogenous and crucially depend on inequality in access to human and political capital accumulation and on the monetary cost associated with corruption. Increasing access to education and political participation would increase the ranges of resource endowments where the high-growth equilibrium exists.

Institutions play pivotal role for the determination of different growth regimes. For better quality institutions (i.e., higher cost of political participation), the range of natural resource abundance where high-growth equilibrium exists would be higher. Thus, for higher cost of political participation there are multiple equilibria, where for high abundance of natural resources, high-growth and poverty-trap equilibria coexist, and for the intermediate ranges of natural resource abundance, high-growth and low-growth equilibria coexist. This implies that the high abundance of natural resources can be consistent with the high growth equilibrium that is observed in the case of Norway, Botswana, etc. Whereas decrease in inequality in access to education and political process increases the range of natural resources where the high-growth is in equilibrium and decreases the rage of natural resources where the poverty-trap is an equilibrium.

There is an important limitation in our model concerning the technology of natural resource sector. The assumption that the natural resource sector employs only unskilled workers can be suitable for some types of natural resources but may not be for the others. Second, this limits our analysis to see the impact of natural resources on income inequality. Clearly, when the society is segmented in two classes, abundance of natural resources may have redistributive implications as well.

Allowing for more flexible settings may help to see the redistributive implications of natural resources. Another possible extension of the model would be to allow for the possibility of unskilled workers protest and fight against rent seeker elites. This could potentially represent the conflicts observed in different resource rich countries and could bring some important insights about open or class conflicts. One possibility would be to model the workers coordination problem with some information sharing mechanism and the associated costs to unite and fight against corrupt elites.

Published Paper:
Wadho, Waqar Ahmed, Education, Rent Seeking and the Curse of Natural Resources (March 2014). Economics & Politics, Vol. 26, Issue 1, pp. 128-156, 2014.

Public Vs Private Schooling Choice at the Household Level

Researcher: Masooma Habib, Hamna Ahmad and Sahar Amjad (Lahore School)

With a grant from Open Society Institute (OSI) Privatization in Education Initiative (PERI), researchers undertook a study titled Determinants of School Choice - Evidence from Punjab, Pakistan. The study addressed the following overarching question: Why do parents choose low cost private schools when free public schools are available? The main emphasis of the study in answering this question was on the role of parents' perceptions in school choice while controlling for a range of child, household and school specific characteristics. The study was based on a sample of 1024 rural households in 64 clusters spanning over 8 tehsils and 7 districts of the Punjab. This project was completed in 2012.

Findings of the study have been published in: Ahmed, H., Amjad, S., & Habib, M. "Private Schooling: Determinants and Implications for Social Justice in Rural Punjab, Pakistan". I. Macpherson, S. Robertson, & G. Walford (Eds.), Education, Privatisation and Social Justice: Case studies from Africa, South Asia and South East Asia, Oxford: Symposium Books Ltd (2014).

Ahmed, H., Amjad, S., Habib, M & Shah., S. A. "Determinants of School Choice: Evidence from Rural Punjab, Pakistan", CREB Working Paper No. 01-13, (2013) Centre for Research in Economics and Business, The Lahore School of Economics, revised 2013.

Higher education, languages, and the persistence of inequitable structures for working-class women in Pakistan

Researcher: Tayyaba Tamim (Lahore School)

Higher education has been much emphasised as a source of empowerment by the government of Pakistan, following international development agendas. However, this paper argues that the empowering effect of higher education on women in Pakistan (see Malik and Courtney 2011Malik, S. and Courtney, K. 2011. Higher education and women's empowerment in Pakistan. Gender and Education, 23(1): 29-45. (doi:10.1080/09540251003674071)[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]; Sameena 2005Sameena, Y. 2005. Impact of higher education in understanding of social recognition in women. PhD thesis, University of Arid Agriculture.

Pakistan research repository Rawalpindi.http://.hec.gov.pk/98/(accessed October 1, 2011) [Google Scholar]) might pertain to only middle-class or a fraction of lower-middle-class women. A capability-based evaluation of the higher education experiences of female participants in Pakistan, belonging to the middle, lower middle and working classes (a division based primarily on household income differentials), entering higher education from private and government schools reveals that the language used to impart higher education along with language-based practices act as gatekeepers which exclude and marginalise those who do not possess the dominant valued language. In this the most disadvantaged of all emerge to be the working-class females who are the most severely excluded.

Developing the argument from a multidisciplinary educational research in the context of Pakistan, this paper contends that gender and social class are intrinsically interwoven and best understood in relation to each other (Moore 2004Moore, R. 2004. Education and society: Issues and explanations in the sociology of education, Cambridge: Polity. [Google Scholar]). Unless we reject an essentialist approach to gender, intra-group differences remain concealed and 'matriarchal inequities', i.e. the unjust treatment 'perpetuated by women against women' (Stone 1994Stone, L. 1994. "Introducing education feminism". In Education feminism reader, Edited by: Stone, L. 1-16. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], 5), remain hidden. Following Bourdieu (1991Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]), the study dismisses the cultural/linguistic deficit theories of educational disadvantage and questions the hierarchies of value, legitimised by institutional authority, which are structured to privilege the dominant class. The paper focuses on issues faced by working-class women in higher education when their access to English has been limited due to discriminatory schooling on the one hand and their institutionally acquired linguistic capital is devalued on the other. Higher education in this paper refers both to college and university education after the completion of secondary school in grade 10.

This research is based on the findings of a 3-year, qualitative study funded by the Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes for Poverty. It uses Sen's [1985. Well-being agency and freedom. Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 4: 169-221] capability approach and Bourdieu's [1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] critical theory to argue that access participation and the empowering outcomes of higher education are contingent on learners' familiarity with the languages used. If there is a discrepancy between the languages used in higher education and the linguistic capital that learners have acquired during schooling without any appropriate measures to fill the gap, participation is bound to be limited.

Findings of this qualitative multiple case study involving eight participants entering higher education from government and private schools in Pakistan reveal that, although the working-class women in the study may have achieved the same functioning as their middle-class counterparts in terms of completing at least 2 years of education, there was a vast difference in terms of their capabilities. Where the middle-class women learnt to unleash their potential, engage with knowledge structures, participate fully, and prepare for professional careers of their choosing because they possessed the linguistic capital valued at the higher education level, the working-class women remained marginalised both within and outside the classroom. They were deselected from the community of learning and forced to accept their low position through a reinforced sense of low self-worth and ability, which culminated in their delayed elimination from higher education. Since the working-class women were denied the use of the language that held the key to their identity, experience, knowledge, imagination, and creativity, they felt dismissed and devalued. The very institution of higher education that had promised them empowerment authorised their invisibility instead.

This interdisciplinary study highlights the value of using capability approach which emphasises that despite the 'equality' of everyone being offered the same resources, text, class, and lectures in higher education, or the same 'functioning', i.e. completion of 2 years of college education the situation remains inequitable because of inequality in the space of 'capabilities' or 'freedom of opportunities' to access education and achieve valued goals. In this language choice in education- and language-based practices become both a site and a tool of perpetuating discrimination. This paper highlights this significance of language in structuring inequality and the need for detailed capability-based case studies along with numerical estimations to account for the inequities embedded within educational contexts that may affect working-class women's access to higher education. The paper also draws attention to the importance of exploring the intra-gender differences intertwined with social class in order to understand the issues of inequality.

Although there are pragmatic constraints that necessitate the use of English in higher education in Pakistan's given situation, this paper highlights the need for adequate support systems for those from government school backgrounds, specifically working-class women who have the least resources available to them to learn the valued language because they tend to be restricted to their homes. However, unless the higher education language policy and practices accept and reflect the linguistic diversity of the given context, participation at this level will be limited. A capability approach-based evaluation emphasises that the notion of equality must be grounded in the reality of human diversity for developing more inclusive policies.

Published Paper:
Gender and Education, Volume 25, No. 2, pp 155-169, 2013.