'Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE)'
Doi
Abstract
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