Community Influences on Schooling and Work Activity of Youth in Pakistan

The schooling and work activities of youth remain fundamental to their human capital development. Yet we have limited understanding of factors influencing these activities in Pakistan and elsewhere. The bulk of research on children’s work and schooling looks primarily to household-level factors to explain current rates. As such, activities’ of youth are viewed as a product of family strategies for confronting poverty. On the other hand, the influences at the community level on work and schooling of youth have received relatively little attention and remain largely undeveloped in the literature. Further, work and schooling activities remain are usually investigated separately in the analyses. Most studies focus on either the work activities or schooling of youth, despite recent appeals to examine these activities simultaneously [DeGraff, Bilsborrow and Herrin (1993); Mahmood, Javaid and Baig (1994) and Weiner and Noman (1997)]. The purpose of this paper is to assess the participation of youth in work and schooling activities and the way household and community factors shape these activities. I address two central research questions in this paper. First, what is the distribution of Pakistani youth in work and schooling activities? Second, what factors influence the likelihood that youth engage in work and/or schooling? Particularly, what is the influence of community-level factors (specifically, availability of schools, wage returns to education, and infrastructure development) on the activities of youth?