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The effectiveness of the arrangements governing an educational system depends on the motivations of key actors. This paper analyses the state of education in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and the role that teachers have played in the political process. It describes how teachers have become embedded in the political system and the way teacher associations and unions have actively pursued demands through various strikes and other forms of actions. While teachers have been successful in improving pay, job security and service benefits, less progress has been made on broader improvements in the schooling system such as the promotion of education in general or improving equity and efficiency in the system.

This study investigates public–private sector wage differentials for male and female waged employees in Pakistan. This is done using latest nationally representative data from the Pakistan Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) 2005. We adopt three methodologies to obtain robust estimates of the wage differential and the results reveal that public sector workers enjoy large wage premia. The gross pro-public wage differential is much larger for women than for men. Our findings also show that while private and public sector workers' differing characteristics 'explain' a larger proportion of the private–public wage gap for men, this is not the case for women.

This paper examines the relationship between teacher unionization, student achievement and teachers' pay using a cross-section of data from private schools in India. We use differences in student mark across subjects to identify within-pupil variation in achievement and find that union membership of the teacher appears to strongly reduce pupil achievement. We find no evidence this could be due to the unobservables not controlled for by this procedure. A school fixed effects equation of teacher pay shows that union membership substantially raises pay and in this case too we find that remaining unobservables are unlikely to explain this outcome. We thus have in this data clear evidence that unions raise cost and reduce student achievement.

This paper explores the extent and nature of gender differences, by age, in household health expenditure allocation. Using South African data, we adopt a hurdle methodology, constructing a sequence of decision stages (reporting sickness, consulting medical practitioner, incurring positive medical expenditure, and the conditional amount of expenditure) in order to examine all these possible channels of gender differentiation. Our results provide evidence of significant pro-female bias among prime age persons (ages 16-40) after controlling for gender differences in the opportunity cost of time spent on seeking medical attention. We infer that expenditure on female health is viewed as an important investment in household welfare in light of women's contribution to household production, particularly over child bearing/ rearing ages. This provides an alternative narrative to the 'investment motive' hypothesis traditionally employed to explain differential allocation of resources to males and females within the household. We also compare the relative explanatory power of household and individual level equations in revealing intra-household gender bias. Our findings suggest that the dimensions of gender differentiation are revealed more clearly in individual level regressions.

This paper investigates the education-earnings relationship in Ghana, drawing on the Ghana Living Standards Survey for 1998-99. The analysis has three main goals: to examine the labor market returns to education amongst wage-employed, self-employed and agricultural workers; to examine the labor market returns to literacy and numeracy skills for these categories of workers; and to analyze the pattern of returns to education along the earnings distribution. We also investigate the shape of the education-earnings relationship. The analysis is done separately by gender and age group, and attempts to address the usual biases when estimating returns to education.

This paper investigates the education-earnings relationship in Pakistan, drawing on the Pakistan Integrated Household Surveys 1998/99 and 2001/02. The analysis has three main goals: to examine the labor market returns to education amongst wage-employed, self-employed and agricultural workers; to examine the labor market returns to literacy and numeracy skills for these categories of workers; and to analyze the pattern of returns to education along the earnings distribution. We also investigate the shape of the education/ earnings relationship. The analysis is done separately by gender and age group, and attempts to address the usual biases when estimating returns to education. Finally, we investigate how key results have changed between 1998/99 and 2001/02.

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage of about one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India's National Education Policy 2020. Using official DISE data, we show that there is hardly any net teacher deficit in the country since there is roughly the same number of surplus teachers as the number of teacher vacancies. Secondly, we show that measuring teacher requirements after removing the estimated fake students from enrolment data greatly reduces the required number of teachers and increases the number of surplus teachers, yielding an estimated net surplus of about 342,000 teachers. Thirdly, we show that if we both remove fake enrolment and also make a suggested hypothetical change to the teacher allocation rule to adjust for the phenomenon of emptying public schools (which has slashed the national median public-school size to a mere 64 students), the estimated net teacher surplus is about 764,000 teachers. Fourthly, we highlight that if government does fresh recruitment to fill the supposed nearly one-million vacancies, the already modest national mean pupil-teacher-ratio (PTR) of 22.8 would fall to 15.9, at a permanent fiscal cost of nearly Rupees 48,000 crore (USD 6.6 billion) per year in 2017-18 prices, which is higher than the individual GDPs of 56 countries in that year. The paper also highlights the volume of schools with extreme PTRs, and estimates the cost of teacher absence, pupil absence and fake enrolments. Overall, the paper highlights the major economic efficiencies that can result from an evidence-based approach to education policy making.