T. Andrabi, Jishnu Das and Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Students Today, Teachers Tomorrow;

Identifying Constraints on the Provision of Education

How to improve educational outcomes remains one of the development challenges today.

Despite powerful global consensus about the MDG’s, 115 million children do not attend primary school in the developing world.

This has been blamed on parents not fully internalizing educational returns (Schultz 2004, Filmer and Schady 2006).

A consistent finding from research is that augmenting teacher resources leads to better outcomes.

Introduction (1)

Introduction (2) Interventions include reducing class-sizes , reducing teacher

absenteeism, or providing additional teachers for poorly performing students among others (Banerjee et. al. 2007, Case and Deaton 1999, Urquiola 2006, and Hanushek 2005).

A randomized intervention to increase the supply of schools through the private educational market failed “because teachers could not be found”, (Alderman et. al., 2003).

This paper asks ; If its that hard to find teachers? How can they be found?

It looks into the availability of low-cost teachers (supply) and its influence on the ability of the market to offer affordable education.

Introduction (3) It aims at linking public investments in secondary

education today to future educational provision. Investing in girls secondary schools (GSS) delivers

this result through private schools. Private schools are a good candidate because they

reflect local market conditions and thus aid in the identification of the teacher supply channel.

Objectives This paper aims at showing that an intertemporal

choice must be made by society for private primary schools to meet the market gap in education provision.

Research objectives To determine the effect of the 10 km rule on

location of a GSS. To determine the effect of location GSS on teacher

wages in the candidate PC To determine whether the location of GSS leads to

“crowding in” of private primary schools in the PC.

Data form and sources Data was collected from; Construction of public schools in the Punjab province

available from the province's ; Educational Management and Information Systems

(EMIS 2001). National Educational Census (NEC 2005)

Village-level demographics baseline and contemporaneous information on village-level characteristics and educational profiles; 1998 and the 1981 population censuses of Punjab

The basic unit of research is the Patwar Circle

Theoretical framework Ljungqvist (1993) and Banerjee (2004), propose that inadequate

supply of teachers can generate poverty traps in the presence of credit constraints.

Banerjee (2004) points out that higher returns to education may lead to declines in the provision of education if the returns increase as a consequence of higher wages in non-teaching professions.

The authors use Pakistan to show how to bridge the teacher supply gap by exploiting;

Low Geographical and occupational mobility for women Low female wages (30 percent lower than men) after controlling for educational

qualifications and experience (World Bank 2005). Large liberal and for-profit private sector presence in Pakistan. GSS construction rule between 1981-2001; with effects of increasing supply of

private primary education.

Empirical Framework (1)

There were two empirical challenges to overcome; To identify the causal impact of GSS’s on subsequent private school

existence. To demonstrate that it works through a teacher supply channel

rather than an increase in the demand for education from secondary-educated women.

First the entrepreneur will only open a school if net return is positive;

Where Feei -school fee for a single student, Wagei individual teacher's salary, and Ni and Ti are the number of students and teachers employed.

Empirical Framework (2)

A reduced form expression for net return can then be written as:

where XiD and Xi

S are village demographics and characteristics that respectively affect the demand for private schooling.

The demand and supply impacts of GSS construction are captured by β1 and γ1 respectively.

Since the net return a private school earns is not observed, we treat net return in Eq. (1) as a latent variable in a probability model and estimate:

Empirical Framework (3)

Sirt is the other government schooling options each option indexed by r.

(vi+εit), consists of a fixed effect unobserved component, vi, and a random component, εit.

The main identification challenge is that the presence of a GSS in village i in time period t is likely a function of the latent unobserved components of the village/region.

Therefore, we instrument for GSS construction using program guidelines for a school expansion program undertaken in the 1980s used as Rulei.

Empirical Framework (4)

GSS construction after 1981 was a consequence a rule based on higher populations, and a ten-kilometer radius rule. They estimate;

Where we have; Xit controls include indicators of village wealth and area. Eq. above

is estimated using Rulei as an instrument for GSSit.

PC fixed effects, αPCi , and polynomials in village population control for the remaining variation that the Rulei exploits to secure no correlation with the demand for private schooling.

Private school covariance with the instrument

There is considerable variation in both eligible and ineligible villages allowing to eliminate the effects of population from the study by linear and quadratic terms.

Results

(1) Eligible village was 1.24 percentage points more likely to receive a GSS.

(2) Controlling for the PC fixed effects results in 1.6 percentage points more likely to receive a GSS.

The confounding factors are found to be insignificant showing that no other government investment is interfering.

First stage results

GSS impact on private school

Analysis (Table 3) An estimation of equation (5) The construction of a GSS increases the probability of a

private school in the village by 9.5 p.p. Column (2) addresses any selection concerns arising from

time-invariant village effects by first-differencing improves to 9.7 p.p.

Private School Existence: The Female Teacher Channel

Supply Side Impact: Teaching Costs

Conclusion Evidence that alleviating local supply-side constraints can support the

provision of education. Over time, government GS school investments “crowd-in” private sector

involvement. Don’t just focus on primary schools; secondary schools matter too. Todays investment in secondary schools is necessary to safeguard future

education. The creation of private schools from marginalized girls labor shows

resurgence of the market system. overall enrollment is significantly higher for villages with private schools

(61 percent vs. 46 percent), as is female enrollment (56 percent vs. 35 percent).

Private schools appear to offer high(er) quality education at far lower costs.

Implicit “subsidy” for Pakistan is the female labor force

Critique Establishing causality for these findings is difficult. The supply side channel used doesn’t speak into

teachers; secondary school graduates are not teachers.

The results may not be replicable in other countries with the respect to the instrument, and the restriction on mobility.

The paper fails to establish the result in terms of quality. It may not get better if secondary school graduates teach.