IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/adbadr/v35y2018i1p155-174.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Gender Discrimination in Education Expenditure in Nepal: Evidence from Living Standards Surveys

Author

Listed:
  • Shaleen Khanal

    (South Asia Watch on Trade, Economics and Environment, Nepal. Author email: shaleenkhanal@gmail.com)

Abstract

There is a significant amount of literature on the role of parental gender preferences in determining the level of education expenditure for children. In this study, I examine the effects of such preferences on parents’ education expenditure in Nepal. Using longitudinal data from three Nepal Living Standards Surveys, I apply several decomposition methods to determine the level of bias that parents display in spending on their children's education. I find that parents indeed spend more on boys than girls in both rural and urban areas in Nepal. I also find that this bias is reflected in the higher enrollment levels of boys than girls in private schools.

Suggested Citation

  • Shaleen Khanal, 2018. "Gender Discrimination in Education Expenditure in Nepal: Evidence from Living Standards Surveys," Asian Development Review, MIT Press, vol. 35(1), pages 155-174, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:tpr:adbadr:v:35:y:2018:i:1:p:155-174
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/adev_a_00109
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Shonchoy, Abu S. & Rabbani, Mehnaz, 2015. "The Bangladesh gender gap in education : biased intra-household educational expenditures," IDE Discussion Papers 522, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    2. Hugo Ñopo, 2008. "Matching as a Tool to Decompose Wage Gaps," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(2), pages 290-299, May.
    3. Behrman, Jere R & Pollak, Robert A & Taubman, Paul, 1982. "Parental Preferences and Provision for Progeny," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(1), pages 52-73, February.
    4. Apsara Karki Nepal, 2016. "The Impact of International Remittances on Child Outcomes and Household Expenditures in Nepal," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 52(6), pages 838-853, June.
    5. Dan A. Black & Amelia M. Haviland & Seth G. Sanders & Lowell J. Taylor, 2008. "Gender Wage Disparities among the Highly Educated," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 43(3), pages 630-659.
    6. Monazza Aslam & Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, 2008. "Gender and household education expenditure in Pakistan," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(20), pages 2573-2591.
    7. Lehmann, Jee-Yeon K. & Nuevo-Chiquero, Ana & Vidal-Fernandez, Marian, 2012. "Explaining the Birth Order Effect: The Role of Prenatal and Early Childhood Investments," IZA Discussion Papers 6755, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Satis C. Devkota & Mukti P. Upadhyay, 2015. "What Factors Change Education Inequality in Nepal?," Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(2), pages 287-308, May.
    9. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    10. Melly, Blaise, 2005. "Decomposition of differences in distribution using quantile regression," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(4), pages 577-590, August.
    11. World Bank, 2014. "World Development Indicators 2014," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 18237.
    12. King, Elizabeth M. & Lillard, Lee A., 1987. "Education policy and schooling attainment in Malaysia and the Philippines," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 167-181, April.
    13. John Strauss & Germano Mwabu & Kathleen Beegle, 2000. "Intrahousehold Allocations: a Review of Theories and Empirical Evidence," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 9(Supplemen), pages 83-143.
    14. Ping Zhang & Arthur van Soest & Xiaodong Gong, 2005. "The effects of the gender of children on expenditure patterns in rural China: a semiparametric analysis," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 20(4), pages 509-527.
    15. Maitra, Pushkar & Pal, Sarmistha & Sharma, Anurag, 2011. "Reforms, Growth and Persistence of Gender Gap: Recent Evidence from Private School Enrolment in India," IZA Discussion Papers 6135, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    16. Kingdon, Geeta Gandhi, 2005. "Where Has All the Bias Gone? Detecting Gender Bias in the Intrahousehold Allocation of Educational Expenditure," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 53(2), pages 409-451, January.
    17. Soham Sahoo, 2017. "Intra-Household Gender Disparity in School Choice: Evidence from Private Schooling in India," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(10), pages 1714-1730, October.
    18. Cynthia Bansak & Brian Chezum, 2009. "How Do Remittances Affect Human Capital Formation of School-Age Boys and Girls?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 145-148, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Harvinder Singh & Angrej Singh Gill & Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, 2023. "Household Expenditure on Secondary Education in Haryana (India): Levels, Patterns and Determinants," Millennial Asia, , vol. 14(4), pages 605-635, December.
    2. Pragya Paneru, 2023. "Students' Creative Writings Mirroring the Social Reality," Technium Social Sciences Journal, Technium Science, vol. 43(1), pages 77-84, May.
    3. Shukla, Prakash Kumar & Reddy A, Bheemeshwar & Kumar, Dushyant, 2024. "Class in caste: Inequalities in human capital investments in children in India," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2013. "Population Average Gender Effects," IZA Discussion Papers 7315, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Fortin, Nicole & Lemieux, Thomas & Firpo, Sergio, 2011. "Decomposition Methods in Economics," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 1, pages 1-102, Elsevier.
    3. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2015. "Average Wage Gaps and Oaxaca–Blinder Decompositions," IZA Discussion Papers 9036, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Atencio,Andrea & Posadas,Josefina, 2015. "Gender gap in pay in the Russian Federation : twenty years later, still a concern," Policy Research Working Paper Series 7407, The World Bank.
    5. Shukla, Prakash Kumar & Reddy A, Bheemeshwar & Kumar, Dushyant, 2024. "Class in caste: Inequalities in human capital investments in children in India," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    6. Brahim Boudarbat & Marie Connolly, 2013. "The gender wage gap among recent post‐secondary graduates in Canada: a distributional approach," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 46(3), pages 1037-1065, August.
    7. repec:pra:mprapa:48888 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Nicodemo, Catia & Raya, Josep M., 2018. "Does Juan Carlos or Nelson Obtain a Larger Price Cut in the Spanish Housing Market?," IZA Discussion Papers 11811, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Gevrek, Z. Eylem & Gevrek, Deniz & Neumeier, Christian, 2020. "Explaining the gender gaps in mathematics achievement and attitudes: The role of societal gender equality," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 76(C).
    10. Ana Fernandes & Martin Huber & Giannina Vaccaro, 2021. "Gender differences in wage expectations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(6), pages 1-24, June.
    11. Gail Pacheco & Chao Li & Bill Cochrane, 2017. "Empirical evidence of the gender pay gap in NZ," Working Papers 2017-05, Auckland University of Technology, Department of Economics.
    12. Jacob, Arun, 2016. "Gender Bias in Educational Attainment in India : The Role of Dowry Payments," MPRA Paper 76338, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Rashmi Rashmi & Bijay Kumar Malik & Sanjay K. Mohanty & Udaya Shankar Mishra & S. V. Subramanian, 2022. "Predictors of the gender gap in household educational spending among school and college-going children in India," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-11, December.
    14. Philippe Van Kerm, 2013. "Generalized measures of wage differentials," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 45(1), pages 465-482, August.
    15. Abdul Malik Iddrisu & Michael Danquah & Alfred Barimah & Williams Ohemeng, 2020. "Gender, age cohort, and household investment in child schooling: New evidence from sub-Saharan Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series wp2020-9, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    16. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2018. "Average Gaps and Oaxaca's Blinder Decompositions: A Cautionary Tale about Regression Estimates of Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes," IZA Discussion Papers 12041, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    17. Tymon Słoczyński, 2020. "Average Gaps and Oaxaca–Blinder Decompositions: A Cautionary Tale about Regression Estimates of Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 73(3), pages 705-729, May.
    18. Antón, José-Ignacio & Muñoz de Bustillo, Rafael, 2013. "Public-private sector wage differentials in Spain. An updated picture in the midst of the Great Recession," MPRA Paper 48897, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Tamar Khitarishvili, 2018. "Gender Pay Gaps in the Former Soviet Union: A Review of the Evidence," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_899, Levy Economics Institute.
    20. Xu, Sijia & Shonchoy, Abu S. & Fujii, Tomoki, 2022. "Assessing gender parity in intrahousehold allocation of educational resources: Evidence from Bangladesh," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    21. Basu, Bharati, 2021. "Do institutional norms affect behavioral preferences: A view from gender bias in the intra-household expenditure allocation in Iran," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 118-134.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    decomposition; education expenditure; gender discrimination; household decisions; Nepal Living Standards Surveys;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H52 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Education
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:adbadr:v:35:y:2018:i:1:p:155-174. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.