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N developing countries, public expenditure on school education increased from 2.9 per cent of GNP in 1970 to 4.1 per cent in the late 1980s. In most of these countries, more than 80 per cent of this public expenditure is used for paying salaries to the school teachers. Despite this, an ILO survey (1991) on “teachers’ salaries” during the mid-1980s collected from fifteen developing countries shows that the teachers do not occupy the same position in the wage hierarchy in comparison with other professions requiring similar qualifications and responsibilities. The overall conclusion is that the teachers in developing countries are poorly paid despite their status in the society. Second, developing country governments have difficulty in monitoring teachers’ activities at school. This is because developing countries often have harsh environments making communication and travel difficult. In addition, roads, railways, and telephones are often in poor condition or nonexistent. At the same time, it is also observed that the teachers are engaged in providing private tutoring to the students for a fee. We hypothesize from the above facts that the existence of a wage differential and the fact that classroom teaching can only be imperfectly monitored, are likely to encourage school teachers to teach school lessons poorly in order to create a demand for income-generating private tutoring. There are many reasons for the demand for private tutoring. It can be either due to the weaknesses of the students or due to the negligence of the teachers. In some cases, although the teachers may

In many LDCs, we observe that the public school teachers receive low wages, expend less than their full effort at school, and provide private tutoring to the students for a fee. To capture this institutional arrangement, we develop a theoretical model which shows that in comparison with ‘no-tutoring’, ‘tutoring’ is welfare reducing for all students in the economy. However, if the government considers only the students in the public system, then ‘tutoring’ can be welfare improving. In that case, the government would set a lower tax rate to pay wages to the teachers and let them provide tutoring to the students for a fee.

The principal objective of this study is to test whether public expenditures on education, health and other development activities have been effective in reducing poverty in India. To ensure sensitivity and robustness of the results, three different measures of poverty belonging to the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke group of poverty measures are used. We consider various types of education expenditures, viz., government expenditures on elementary, secondary, higher/university and "other" levels. Data for fourteen Indian states from 13th to 53rd rounds of National Sample Survey of India are used for estimating poverty. Using unbalanced panel data techniques, we test Fixed effects, Random effects and OLS models, and concludes that education, health and development expenditures help reduce poverty. In particular, expenditure on higher, university, technical, adult and vocational educations as opposed to elementary and secondary education is more effective in poverty reduction. Several policy conclusions are advanced.

Provision of universal free public education has been argued for in the literature on equity ground. This paper develops a new model of public school education and demonstrates how the presence of private tutoring in developing countries, compromises the above argument. The teachers, by shirking at school and supplying private tutoring to the students at a cost, divert the benefits of free public education towards themselves. This model also conforms with the merit-cum-means principle adopted in developing countries to subsidize the education of the poor and high ability students when it is extended to an heterogeneous environment.

Provision of universal free public education has been argued for in the literature on equity ground. This paper develops a new model of public school education and demonstrates how the presence of private tutoring in developing countries, compromises the above argument. The teachers, by shirking at school and supplying private tutoring to the students at a cost, divert the benefits of free public education towards themselves. This model also conforms with the merit-cum-means principle adopted in developing countries to subsidize the education of the poor and high ability students when it is extended to an heterogeneous environment.

This article examines the effects of public infrastructure on the productive performance of 12 two-digit Canadian manufacturing industries. A flexible cost function incorporating public capital infrastructure is estimated for each industry separately using annual time series data for 1961–1995. The effects of public infrastructure on productivity are measured in terms of both cost-saving (dual) and output-augmenting (primal) measures. We also investigate how public capital influences the input demand and cost structure in each industry and calculate the rate of return to public capital. The empirical results provide strong evidence of the important role public infrastructure plays in the productivity of manufacturing industries. The public capital serves as a substitute for both private capital and labor in most industries. The rates of return to public capital are significant and vary over the years.

High-energy electron beams generated by linear accelerators, typically in the range 6 to 20 MeV, are used in small field sizes for radiotherapy of localized superficial tumors. Unshielded silicon diodes (Si-D) are commonly considered suitable detectors for relative dose measurements in small electron fields due to their high spatial resolution. Recently, a novel synthetic single crystal diamond diode (SCDD) showed suitable properties for standard electron beams and small photon beams dosimetry. The aim of the present study is twofold: to characterize 6 to 15 MeV small electron beams shaped by using commercial tubular applicators with 2, 3, 4 and 5 cm diameter and to assess the dosimetric performance under such irradiation conditions of the novel SCDD dosimeter by comparison with commercially available dosimeters, namely a Si-D and a plane-parallel ionization chamber. Percentage depth dose curves, beam profiles and output factors (OFs) were measured. A good agreement among the dosimeters was observed in all of the performed measurements. As for the tubular applicators, two main effects were evidenced: (i) OFs larger than unity were measured for a number of field sizes and energies, with values up to about 1.3, that is an output 30% greater than that obtained at the 10 × 10 cm 2 reference field; (ii) for each diameter of the tubular applicator a noticeable increase of the OF values was observed with increasing beam energy, up to about 100% in the case of the smaller applicator. This OF behavior is remarkably different from what typically observed for small blocked fields having the same size and energy as those used in this study. OFs for tubular applicators depend considerably on the field size, so interpolation is unadvisable to predict the linear accelerator output for such applicators whereas reliable high-resolution detectors, as the silicon and diamond diodes used in this work allow OF measurements with uncertainties of about 1%. © 2013 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. Printed in the UK & the USA.