GENDER AND PUBLIC SPENDING ON EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN: A CASE STUDY OF DISAGGREGATED BENEFIT INCIDENCE

To what extent has government education spending in Pakistan been effective in reducing gender gaps in enrollments? To answer this question, this article reviews the benefit incidence of government education spending. It finds that government subsidies directed towards primary education are pro poor in all four provinces of Pakistan. Moreover, females has disadvantage in access to primary education. However, government subsidies directed towards higher education poorly targeted and poorest income group receives less than the riches income group and indeed favor those who are better off. Similarly, the gender disparity in access to public subsidy is higher at tertiary level and lowest at primary level, which also reflects poor targeting. Improving targeting to the poor as well as better female participation involves not simply rearranging the public subsidies, but also addressing the constraints that prevent the poor and females from accessing these services.Gender, Public Expenditure on Education, Benefit Incidence

Gender and Public Spending on Education in Pakistan: A Case Study of Disaggregated Benefit Incidence

It is generally believed that education is one of the basic rights of every human being, irrespective of sex, age, creed, religion, etc. Moreover, the target of universal primary education cannot be achieved without female access to educational opportunities, which contains several external benefits. In addition, access to educational opportunities assumes prime importance for empowerment of women. However, inequalities in access to education between males and females can be found in many countries across the world including Pakistan. According to conventional wisdom, a combination of cultural, social, and economic factors are responsible for placing young girls and women at a serious disadvantage vis-a-vis access to school and the prospect of completing their education. This disadvantage can be altered through public policies including gender sensitive public spending on education. The above assertion about the role of public policy is based on the theory of public finance1, which demonstrates that public expenditure on education can affect the population in a number of ways, which has significant gender dimensions. For example, government spending on primary education is likely to generate more income for women than spending on universities, for the simple reason that there are relatively more women primary school teachers than women university lecturers. Moreover, these expenditures provide subsidized educational services, which is a form of “in kind transfers”. These “in-kind transfers” improve the current well-being of the recipients, and enhance their longer-run income-earning potential. They can be considered as both current and capital transfers to the recipients, and therefore can be termed as the “benefit incidence” of public spending. The main concern of this paper is to assess the gender dimension of the benefitincidence”. The tudy has two basic objectives. First and foremost, it aims to investigate which income group actually benefits from the government’s subsidized.

Dynamic Consequences of the 1997 NFC Award: Provincial Social Sector Expenditures

An adequate provision of social services is a concurrent function of federal and provincial governments. However, in Pakistan, the financing and delivery of social services largely prevails in the hands of provinces and major sources of revenues in the hand of federal government, which creates vertical imbalances. Federal transfers are the mechanism for their correction and these are constituted through the National Finance Commission (NFC) Awards. The last NFC Award was constituted in 1997 and it changed both the size of divisible pool and the share of federal and provincial governments in the divisible pool. The changed provincial shares have based on higher tax revenue collection, which was not materialised during the following four-year period after the award. Therefore, provincial governments experienced the shortfall in the federal transfers during last four years after the award and have experienced a lower growth in transfers than projected in 1997 NFC Award. This is in contrast with the provincial experience during 1991 NFC Award, in which provinces had received higher revenue transfers from federal government than projected.

The Burden of Stabilisation on Provinces and its Implications for the Social Sectors

An agenda of economic reform encompassing a broad range of structural adjustment policies (SAP) is underway in Pakistan since 1987-88. These policies have an adverse impact on the pace of economic growth and created more poverty and inequality in the country [see Bengali and Ahmed (2002); Kemal (2003)]. These studies argues that during the last fifteen years each government is trying to stabilise the economy even at the cost of economic growth and delivery of social services. The negative impact of stabilisation policies on economic growth of the country is reflected in the decline of GDP growth from an average annual growth of 4.6 percent during 1990s as compared to 6.5 percent during 1980s. Similarly, negligence of social services delivery is reflected in the recent UNDP Report (2003), which, show that the ranking of Pakistan has slipped from 136 to 141 along with the decline in many other social sector statistics. The top government officials now also recognise these facts and the relapse of growth oriented policy can be heard more often. Trend in public finance statistics of the country clearly indicate that one of the important victim of stabilisation policies are the expenditures of provincial governments. In last several years the significant portion of onus of containment of fiscal deficit has been shifted towards the provincial governments. The onus of containment of fiscal deficit by all four provincial governments during the last decade has increased from 18 percent to 50 percent, which has devastating impact on the service provision and poverty reduction.

Dynamic Consequences of the 1997 NFC Award: Provincial Social Sector Expenditures

An adequate provision of social services is a concurrent function of federal and provincial governments. However, in Pakistan, the financing and delivery of social services largely prevails in the hands of provinces and major sources of revenues in the hand of federal government, which creates vertical imbalances. Federal transfers are the mechanism for their correction and these are constituted through the National Finance Commission (NFC) Awards. The last NFC Award was constituted in 1997 and it changed both the size of divisible pool and the share of federal and provincial governments in the divisible pool. The changed provincial shares have based on higher tax revenue collection, which was not materialised during the following four-year period after the award. Therefore, provincial governments experienced the shortfall in the federal transfers during last four years after the award and have experienced a lower growth in transfers than projected in 1997 NFC Award. This is in contrast with the provincial experience during 1991 NFC Award, in which provinces had received higher revenue transfers from federal government than projected

Gender and Public Spending on Education in Pakistan: A Case Study of Disaggregated Benefit Incidence

It is generally believed that education is one of the basic rights of every human being, irrespective of sex, age, creed, religion, etc. Moreover, the target of universal primary education cannot be achieved without female access to educational opportunities, which contains several external benefits. In addition, access to educational opportunities assumes prime importance for empowerment of women. However, inequalities in access to education between males and females can be found in many countries across the world including Pakistan. According to conventional wisdom, a combination of cultural, social, and economic factors are responsible for placing young girls and women at a serious disadvantage vis-a-vis access to school and the prospect of completing their education. This disadvantage can be altered through public policies including gender sensitive public spending on education. The above assertion about the role of public policy is based on the theory of public finance1, which demonstrates that public expenditure on education can affect the population in a number of ways, which has significant gender dimensions. For example, government spending on primary education is likely to generate more income for women than spending on universities, for the simple reason that there are relatively more women primary school teachers than women university lecturers. Moreover, these expenditures provide subsidized educational services, which is a form of “in kind transfers”. These “in-kind transfers” improve the current well-being of the recipients, and enhance their longer-run income-earning potential. They can be considered as both current and capital transfers to the recipients, and therefore can be termed as the “benefit incidence” of public spending. The main concern of this paper is to assess the gender dimension of the benefitincidence”. The tudy has two basic objectives. First and foremost, it aims to investigate which income group actually benefits from the government’s subsidize

Financial Implications of the 7th NFC Award and the Impact on Social Services

The financial status of provincial governments in Pakistan hinges largely on federal transfers to the provinces constituted through National Finance Commission (NFC) Awards. These awards design the formula of distribution of resources between federal and provincial governments, and among the provinces for five years. Historically, federal and all provincial governments have tried their level best to get a higher share of the revenues in order to stabilise their own financial status. As a result, there are very few examples of consensus based conclusive awards in the past. These consensus based awards have had different gainers. For instance, in the NFC Award 1991, provincial governments were the main beneficiaries as they received substantially higher shares of buoyant taxes such as sales and income taxes. In contrast, the largest beneficiary of the NFC Award 1997 was the federal government as it allocated higher shares of all taxes to itself in order to stabilise its financial status. Given the sensitivity attached to NFC awards, where an increase or decrease in the share of any tier of the government affects the share of other tiers with the same magnitude in the opposite direction, it seems very difficult to develop a consensus among federal and provincial governments. As a result, since the separation of East Pakistan, there have been only three conclusive NFC Awards (1974, 1991, 1997) and one presidential distribution order (2006) prior to the 7th NFC Award

Model the System from Adversary Viewpoint: Threats Identification and Modeling

Security attacks are hard to understand, often expressed with unfriendly and limited details, making it difficult for security experts and for security analysts to create intelligible security specifications. For instance, to explain Why (attack objective), What (i.e., system assets, goals, etc.), and How (attack method), adversary achieved his attack goals. We introduce in this paper a security attack meta-model for our SysML-Sec framework, developed to improve the threat identification and modeling through the explicit representation of security concerns with knowledge representation techniques. Our proposed meta-model enables the specification of these concerns through ontological concepts which define the semantics of the security artifacts and introduced using SysML-Sec diagrams. This meta-model also enables representing the relationships that tie several such concepts together. This representation is then used for reasoning about the knowledge introduced by system designers as well as security experts through the graphical environment of the SysML-Sec framework.Comment: In Proceedings AIDP 2014, arXiv:1410.322