Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan

This paper 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.

Two potential channels of gender bias are examined: bias in the decision whether to enrol/keep both sons and daughters in school, and bias in the decision of education expenditure conditional on keeping both sons and daughters.

Key findings include:

• in junior 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 - the decision of enroling/keeping both sons and daughters in school
• household fixed effects estimation suggests that the observed strong gender difference in education expenditure is a within rather than an across household phenomenon.

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PUBLISHER About: Global Poverty Research Group (GPRG)

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