The relative effectiveness of government and private schools in Pakistan: are girls worse off?

By M. Aslam. 2009

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b8c23efc1e89a9c67dfac796241fa61c27d0d3e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. M. Aslam
2. Geeta Kingdon
3. Mehtabul Azam
4. Joanna Härmä
5. Jeremy R. Magruder
6. K. Deininger
7. Yanyan Liu

In Education

1. M. Aslam
2. Geeta Kingdon
3. Mehtabul Azam
4. Joanna Härmä
5. Suman Seth
6. S. Alkire

In Safety Research

1. M. Aslam
2. Mehtabul Azam
3. Geeta Kingdon
4. Joanna Härmä
5. Stefan Dercon
6. Abhijeet Singh
7. C. Cattaneo
8. Suman Seth

Citations in the corpus

• Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan (2008, background): “…conditional education expenditure on girls because of lack of access rather than due to parental discrimination.15 However, there is also evidence (Aslam, 2005) to suggest that male children are more likely to be sent to more expensive private schools in Pakistan and this could be one mechanism…”
• Are Girls the Fairer Sex in India? Revisiting Intra-Household Allocation of Education Expenditure (2013, methodology): “We use a Hurdle model (Wooldridge, 2002, p536-38) to separate the initial decision of w = 0 from the decision of how much w given positive w.(3) Hurdle Models are two-tier models because the hurdle or first tier is the decision of whether to choose a positive w or not (w = 0 versus w > 0), and the s”