Human Capital Accumulation in Post Green Revolution Rural Pakistan: A Progress Report (The Distinguishedl Lecture)

Abstract

Two years ago at this conference I presented some preliminary results from a large micro-economic research project analysing the detenninants and consequences of human capital accumulation in rural Pakistan. At that time the entry, cleaning and evaluation of the data, generated by a specially designed rural household and school survey, had just been completed and the first phase of the econometric work programme had barely begun. Since then the research team has made substantial progress on the analytic work programme. This paper is a report on that progress. The research project on which I am reporting was designed to be relevant to important education and rural development policy issues. In my previous paper I noted that, despite productivity enhancing technological change, research based on large special purpose micro data sets remains a time intensive activity. I referred to the resulting tension between the researchers' desire to satisfy the policy makers' urgent need for findings and the researchers' scholarly commitment to sound analysis. I suggested that intennediate outputs can help resolve the tension though they then are subject to the caveat of being open to refinement and revision. I am greatly relieved to inform you that none of the results I report today contradict results reported in my previous paper. Some of what I report are, from the research team's perspective "final", while others are from work in progress and, therefore, subject to revision.