Teacher Absence as a Factor in Gender Inequalities in Access to Primary Schooling in Rural Pakistan

The authors describe how Pakistan has grappled with land reform, surely one of the most intractable and divisive issues facing agriculture anywhere. The land-tenure system at independence in 1947 included a high degree of land ownership concentration, absentee landlordism, insecurity of tenant tenure, and excessive rent. Land reform since 1947 focused on imposition of ceilings on landholding, distribution of land to landless tenants and small owners, and readjustments of contracts to improve the position of the tenant. These reformist measures have removed some but by no means all of the undesirable characteristics of the system. The authors list as well as present a critique of the reports of five official committees and commissions on land reform. The reports highlight the conflicts and ideologies of the reformers. The predominant ideal of the land reformers is a system of peasant proprietorship although some reformers favoured other systems such as communal farming and state ownership of land, and still others favoured cash rents over share rents. More pragmatic reformers recognized that tenancy is likely to be with Pakistan for the foreseeable future and that the batai (sharecropping) arrangement is the most workable system. According to the editors, the batai system can work to the advantage of landlord and tenant if the ceilings on landholding can be sufficiently lowered (and enforced), the security of the tenant is ensured, and the tenant has recourse to the courts for adjudication of disputes with landlords. Many policy-makers in Pakistan have come to accept that position but intervention by the State to realize the ideal has been slow. The editors conclude that" ... the end result of these land reforms is that they have not succeeded in significantly changing the status quo in rural Pakistan" (p. 29).

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Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE)-Pilot Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial (cRCT) in Public Schools of Rural Pakistan

Case Medical Research ◽

10.31525/ct1-nct04254393 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Keyword(s):

Randomized Controlled Trial ◽

Public Schools ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial ◽

Early Adolescent ◽

Randomized Controlled ◽

Rural Pakistan ◽

Cluster Randomized

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Women’s Education May Be Even Better Than We Thought: Estimating the Gains from Education When Schooling Ain’t Learning

10.35489/bsg-rise-wp_2020/049 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Michelle Kaffenberger ◽

Lant Pritchett

Keyword(s):

Child Mortality ◽

Women's Education ◽

Basic Education ◽

Women's Empowerment ◽

Women’S Empowerment ◽

Life Outcomes ◽

Primary Schooling ◽

The Impact ◽

Financial Practices ◽

Attenuation Bias

Women’s schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which both contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries, we show the association of women’s education (defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy) with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. First, estimates of the association of outcomes with schooling alone cannot distinguish between the association of outcomes with schooling that actually produces increased learning and schooling that does not. Second, typical estimates do not address attenuation bias from measurement error. Using the new data on literacy to partially address these deficiencies, we find that the associations of women’s basic education (completing primary schooling and attaining literacy) with child mortality, fertility, women’s empowerment and the associations of men’s and women’s basic education with positive financial practices are three to five times larger than standard estimates. For instance, our country aggregated OLS estimate of the association of women’s empowerment with primary schooling versus no schooling is 0.15 of a standard deviation of the index, but the estimated association for women with primary schooling and literacy, using IV to correct for attenuation bias, is 0.68, 4.6 times bigger. Our findings raise two conceptual points. First, if the causal pathway through which schooling affects life outcomes is, even partially, through learning then estimates of the impact of schooling will underestimate the impact of education. Second, decisions about how to invest to improve life outcomes necessarily depend on estimates of the relative impacts and relative costs of schooling (e.g., grade completion) versus learning (e.g., literacy) on life outcomes. Our results do share the limitation of all previous observational results that the associations cannot be given causal interpretation and much more work will be needed to be able to make reliable claims about causal pathways.

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School Choice in Rural Pakistan

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.2177104 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Hadia Majid

Keyword(s):

School Choice ◽

Rural Pakistan

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The Role of Ideal Theory

10.1093/oso/9780190683023.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Christie Hartley

Keyword(s):

Ideal Theory ◽

Racial Minorities ◽

Gender Inequalities ◽

Liberal Society ◽

Social Categories ◽

Ideal Society ◽

Gender And Race ◽

Theories Of Justice ◽

Comprehensive Doctrines

This chapter discusses whether political liberalism’s commitment to ideal theory makes it ill-suited for theorizing about justice for socially subordinated groups such as women and racial minorities. It is shown that political liberalism’s commitment to ideal theory does not entail assuming away race or gender as social categories that give rise to concerns about justice. Even within a politically liberal well-ordered (ideal) society racial or gender inequalities may arise due to the role that beliefs about race or gender play in some persons’ comprehensive doctrines. Furthermore, it is argued that theories of justice developed for a well-ordered politically liberal society provide important guidance for correcting injustices on the basis of gender and race in nonideal societies.

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