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.
Highlights
One plausible explanation for girls’ very inferior educational outcomes relative to boys in Pakistan would seem to be that girls receive less educational expenditure than boys in the within-household allocation of resources
Results suggest that the observed strong gender difference in education expenditure is a within rather than an across household phenomenon
The objective of this study is to test whether the commonly used indirect expenditure (Engel curve) methodology is capable of discerning bias in the within-household allocation of educational expenditures in Pakistan
Summary
One plausible explanation for girls’ very inferior educational outcomes relative to boys in Pakistan would seem to be that girls receive less educational expenditure than boys in the within-household allocation of resources. One would be interested in the average unconditional expenditure on girls and boys and in the distribution of the expenditure.3 To examine this first (‘averaging’) explanation of the failure of Engel Curve methods, we will estimate Hurdle Models to analyse the two household decisions separately, i.e. the binary and conditional expenditure decisions. This will highlight the two possible mechanisms of bias in intra-household allocations of educational expenditure. It is possible that using household level data somehow makes it more difficult to detect gender biases in intra-household allocations To examine this second (aggregation) explanation, we exploit the fact that we have data on educational expenditure of each individual child in a given household.
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