Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan
Monazza Aslam () and
Geeta Kingdon
Applied Economics, 2008, vol. 40, issue 20, 2573-2591
Abstract:
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.
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036840600970252 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Gender and Household Education Expenditure in Pakistan (2005) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:applec:v:40:y:2008:i:20:p:2573-2591
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20
DOI: 10.1080/00036840600970252
Access Statistics for this article
Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips
More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().