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

Two years ago at this conference I presented some preliminaryresults from a large micro-economic research project analysing thedetenninants and consequences of human capital accumulation in ruralPakistan. At that time the entry, cleaning and evaluation of the data,generated by a specially designed rural household and school survey, hadjust been completed and the first phase of the econometric workprogramme had barely begun. Since then the research team has madesubstantial progress on the analytic work programme. This paper is areport on that progress. The research project on which I am reportingwas designed to be relevant to important education and rural developmentpolicy issues. In my previous paper I noted that, despite productivityenhancing technological change, research based on large special purposemicro data sets remains a time intensive activity. I referred to theresulting tension between the researchers’ desire to satisfy the policymakers’ urgent need for findings and the researchers’ scholarlycommitment to sound analysis. I suggested that intennediate outputs canhelp resolve the tension though they then are subject to the caveat ofbeing open to refinement and revision. I am greatly relieved to informyou that none of the results I report today contradict results reportedin my previous paper. Some of what I report are, from the researchteam’s perspective “final”, while others are from work in progress and,therefore, subject to revision.