Mother or Motherland: Can a Government Have an Impact on Educational Attainment of the Population? Preliminary Evidence from India

Sumon Bhaumik and Manisha Chakrabarty ()

No 4954, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper, using data from the 61st round of the (Indian) National Sample Survey, we examine the relative impacts of personal-household and state-level characteristics (including government policy) on the likelihood of transition from one educational level to the next. Our analysis suggests that the most important factors driving these transition likelihoods are personal and household characteristics like gender and education of household heads. However, state-level characteristics and government policies have a significant impact on these transition likelihoods as well, especially for transitions from the lowest levels of education to somewhat higher levels. The odds of making the transition to higher education, especially tertiary education, are systematically lower for women than for men, for individuals in rural areas than those in urban areas, and for Muslims than for Hindus. An important conclusion of our analysis is that there is significant scope for government policy to address educational gaps between various demographic and other groups in the country.

Keywords: likelihood of transition; government policy; educational attainment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published as 'Educational Attainment in India: What Drives Transition' in: ICRA's Bulletin: Money & Finance, February 2013, 95 -112

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4954.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Mother or motherland: Can a government have an impact on educational attainment of the population? Preliminary evidence from India (2010)
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:iza:izadps:dp4954

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().