The progress of school education in India

This paper provides an overview of school education in India.First, it places India's educational achievements in internationalperspective, particularly against countries with which it isnow increasingly compared, especially China. Second, the paperexamines schooling access in terms of enrolment and school attendancerates, and schooling quality in terms of literacy rates, learningachievement levels, school resources, and teacher inputs. Third,the paper investigates the role of private schooling in India,examining the extent of growth of private schooling and surveyingevidence on the relative effectiveness and unit costs of privateand public schools. Last, the paper discusses some major publiceducation initiatives. The concluding section suggests a futureresearch agenda and appeals for rigorous evaluation of the impactsand costs of the numerous existing educational interventions,in order to learn about their relative cost-effectiveness forevidence-based policy-making.     

Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan

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.     

Gender diversity and firm performance: evidence from India and Singapore

ABSTRACT

This study investigates if gender diversity on boards is an effective driver of financial performance. For this purpose, this study choses two countries, one of which has the soft law approach (Singapore) while the other has mandatory requirements (India) on corporate boards gender diversity. By doing so, it examines if there is a comparability between the listed firms of the two countries. Our results suggest that the gender diversity has a positive and significant effect on the financial performance of the firms of both the countries. Although, the gender diversity of the two countries does not seem to affect the growth opportunities of both the countries. Further, our results indicate that the board characteristics affect the performance positively and significantly when the sample is divided into five quantiles for the firms in these two countries. These findings have implications to the managerial decision making and relevance to stewardship theory and resource dependency theory.     

School Participation in Rural India

This paper presents an analysis of the determinants of school participation in rural north India, based on a recent household survey which includes detailed information on school characteristics. School participation, especially among girls, responds to a wide range of variables, including parental education and motivation, social background, dependency ratios, work opportunities, village development, teacher postings, mid-day meals and infrastructural quality. Mid-day meals are particularly effective: the provision of a mid-day meal in the local school roughly halves the proportion of girls excluded from the schooling system. School quality matters, though it is not related in a simple way to specific inputs.     

New Evidence on Class Size Effects: A Pupil Fixed Effects Approach*

The impact of class size on student achievement remains a thorny question for educational decision makers. Meta‐analyses of empirical studies emphasize the absence of class‐size effects but detractors have argued against such pessimistic conclusions because many of the underlying studies have not paid attention to the endogeneity of class size. This article uses a stringent method to address the endogeneity problem using Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data on 47 countries. We measure the class size effect by relating the difference in a student's achievement across subjects to the difference in his/her class size across subjects. This (subject‐differenced) within‐pupil achievement production function avoids the problem of the non‐random matching of children to specific schools, and to classes within schools. The results show a statistically significant negative effect of class size in 14 countries, but the effect size is small in most cases. Several robustness tests are carried out, including control for students’ subject‐specific ability and subject‐specific teacher characteristics, and correction for possible measurement error. Thus, our approach to addressing the endogeneity problem confirms the findings of meta‐analyses that find little support for class size effects. Additionally, we find that class size effects are smaller in countries with higher teacher quality.     

Technology,Exports And Firm Efficiency In Taiwanese Manufacturing

Using firm-level data from the 1986 Census of Manufactures of Taiwan, we examine the links between technical efficiency and firm investments in technology and exports. Stochastic production frontier techniques are used to estimate the technical efficiency of firms by investments in technology as well as by export orientation. Our results indicate that accounting for firm investments in technology is critical in explaining the strong export-productivity link in the extant literature. For the group of large, high technology firms, the differences in the mean efficiencies between exporters and non-exporters are not significantly different than zero in all nine industries under study. However, for the large number of small firms that make no formal investments in technology. exporters are significantly closer to the production frontier than their counterparts that sell in the domestic market.     

Technological Capability and Firm Efficiency in Taiwan (China)

This article highlights the importance of firms' own investmentsin technological capability. Recent research on the nature andextent of technical change in developing countries shows thatthe accumulation of technological capability should be treatednot as a by-product of some other activity but as an activityin its own right. This research also points to the criticalrole of firms and indicates that firm-level efforts to obtaininternational knowledge may have higher payoffs when accompaniedby complementary investments in the development of in-housetechnological capabilities. Using micro data from Taiwan (China), the authors estimate thetechnical efficiency of firms. They proxy firm-level effortsat modifying or adapting technology by expenditures on researchand development and on-the-job training. They then use a stochasticproduction frontier model to estimate the correlation of a firm'sefficiency both with investments in training and research anddevelopment and with international linkages (such as exporting,direct foreign investment, and foreign technology licenses).The evidence from manufacturing firms in Taiwan suggests thatefficiency is positively correlated with the firm's investmentsin training and research and development and with its informalcontacts with foreign purchasers through export sales.     

Competition Law and Competition Policy in India: How the Competition Commission has Dealt with Anticompetitive Restraints by Government Entities

Review of Industrial Organization - Can adoption of an antitrust/competition law substitute for a formal competition policy that lays down principles for reforming other government policies that...     

Labour Market Flexibility,Wages and Incomes in Sub‐Saharan Africa in the 1990s

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of how African labour markets have performed in the 1990s. It is argued that the failure of African labour markets to create good paying jobs has resulted in excess labour supply in the form of either open unemployment or a growing self‐employment sector. One explanation for this outcome is a lack of labour market ‘flexibility’ keeping formal sector wages above their equilibrium level and restricting job creation. We identify three attributes of labour market flexibility. First, whether real wages decline over time; secondly, the tendency for wages to adjust in the face of unemployment; and thirdly, the extent of wage differentials between sectors and/or firms of various size. Recent research shows that real wages in Africa during the 1990s may have been more downwardly flexible than previously thought and have been surprisingly responsive to unemployment rates, yet large wage differentials between formal and informal sector firms remain. This third sense of the term ‘inflexibility’ can explain a common factor across diverse African economies — the high income divide between those working in large firms and those not. Those working in the thriving self‐employment sector in Ghana have something in common with the unemployed in South Africa — both have very low income opportunities relative to those in large firms.