Friday, July 27, 2007

Caste and Education in Nepal



An interesting study by the World Bank on educational achievement in Nepal is reported in the very-informative, highly-commendable blog of Freidrich Huebler (hat tip to the resourceful Bayesian Heresy). Nepal is poor: GDP per head is around $300, secondary school attendance is 30% (less than 1 in 3 kids attend secondary school), primary school attendance is 74% and life expectancy is 60 years. It is a country with an overwhelming Hindu majority, clearly stratified into dozens of hereditary, mutually-exclusive groups, called castes: the Brahman caste (priests and scholars) ranks top, followed by the Kshatriya (rulers and warriors), Vaishya (merchants), Sudra (peasants and manual workers), and the Dalits (untouchables). The following tables from Huebler show clear disparities in school attendance across castes/ethnic groups

Here are Hueber’s explanations:
At the level of the country as a whole, the primary school NAR [Net Attendance Rate] is 73.5 percent. Children from Brahman, Chhetri, and Newar households have the highest NAR values, between 86.8 and 93 percent. The lowest primary school net attendance rates are observed among Muslims (32.1 percent) and Tarai Dalits (37.5 percent). Hill Dalits (primary NAR 73.5 percent) are much more likely to attend school than Tarai Dalits. This difference in school participation can be explained by the fact that Dalits from the hill zone of Nepal are more integrated into society and therefore less subject to discrimination than Dalits from the southern tarai.
Explanation:
Secondary school net attendance rates in Nepal are shown in Figure 3. Overall, 30.9 percent of all Nepali children of secondary school age attend secondary school. The pattern of disparity is similar to that at the primary level of the education system. NAR [Net Attendance Rate] values are highest among children from Newar, Brahman, and Chhetri households, ranging from 44.6 to 52.3 percent. Tarai Dalits (secondary NAR 7.2 percent) and Muslims (7.9 percent) are least likely to attend secondary school. Similar to the primary level, Hill Dalits have a net attendance rate that is twice as high as that of Tarai Dalits…To build an equitable and inclusive society, and to reach the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education, it is necessary to design policies that aid Muslims, Tarai Dalits, and other disadvantaged groups in Nepal.
Nobel-laureate, George Akerlof has asked the following question: why do social norms persist, despite their incompatibilities with urbanisation and development? His answer: it’s because the costs for an individual member of society of deviating from the social norms (becoming an outcaste) exceeds the benefits of staying within the norms. He takes the example of outcastes in India, who face the following costs: (1) “can only do scavenging (or other polluting) jobs,” (2) “cannot eat with caste members (including parents and siblings), touch them, touch their food,” and (3) “their own children will be also outcastes and will suffer the same prohibitions.”
Akerlof concludes that “if the punishment of becoming an outcaste is predicted to be sufficiently severe, the system of caste is held in equilibrium, irrespective of individual tastes, by economic incentives; the predictions of the caste system become a self-fulfilling prophecy…economic rewards may favor those who follow prevailing social custom; and in so doing, they give economic reasons why such social customs may endure.“
Another economist, Evan Osborne, argues that the caste system perpetuates itself for a political reason: in a country where the government is corrupt and/or is rent-seeking, citizens, eager to capture their share of the rent, are driven to organising themselves into pressure groups. And the most ‘efficient’ way to create a pressure group is through caste membership, as the latter is easily identifiable and fail-safe (it is not possible for a non-caste member to pass on as a caste member). Thus, according to Osborne, it is possible to find a society where, as economic development increases the size of the cake available for sharing, caste identity matters more and more in politics, though it may become less and less important in commerce.
Akerlof’s and Osborne’s views have different policy implications. For Osborne, eliminate corruption and rent-seeking, and the caste system will crumble. For Akerlof, it is more deeply rooted in individual incentives and can only weaken if the punishment for being an outcaste is reduced.

1 comment:

Friedrich Huebler said...

Thank you for mentioning the article from my blog on international education statistics, I am glad that you found it informative. Thank you also for the interesting economic analysis of the caste system.