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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the demand side determinants of schooling of Pakistani urban children and the factors affecting boys and girls' schooling separately.

This is an empirical study using the non‐linear maximum likelihood probability (probit) function on primary data.

Besides other variables it has been observed that the poverty remains an important determinant of school participation. Poor households keep their children out of school due to their inability to afford the cost of schooling.

On the basis of this study a socio‐economic policy can be formulated for a developing country like Pakistan.

A development policy can be formulated on the basis of this research for the enhancement of human resource development for a developing and an orthodox economy like Pakistan.

The paper is beneficial to the researchers, policy makers, and social scientists for the enhancement of the level of social welfare through its findings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent and the effect of socio‐economic and demographic factors that lead to the phenomenon of child labor in the fishing sector of Balochistan (province of Pakistan).

In order to explore the objectives, the paper first develops simple hypothesis followed by descriptive and regression analysis.

The findings of the paper show that in the coastal areas about 30 percent of the children are involved in fishing. It is observed that the main cause of child labor is not poverty it comes out to be low quality of education, lack of job opportunity, and lack of development.

The data used for the assessment cover wide‐spread coastal areas but still have some limitation for several reasons. First, it is rapid assessment done to gain the first hand knowledge about the extent of child labor and their socio‐economic culture they belong too. Second, the official data do not include information on education and employment facilities in these towns. Thus, severity may not be truly reflected.

Education with training needed to improve fishing skill may help in this regard. The state of education also needs improvement as high illiteracy and dropout rates reflect inadequacy.

Extent of child labor in these towns is not reported by any official statistics. This paper attempts to provide the picture of the severity of the problems and its probable causes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causal links between, foreign direct investment (FDI), openness through trade, poverty, value added of agriculture sector as share of GDP, urban population and child labor by using annual data for Pakistan over the period 1970‐2003.

The methodological framework for causality testing is a multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) model. This permits investigation of the importance of factors on the incidence of child labor in Pakistan. More generally, this study seek to establish the causal link between these factors and child labor, which might suggest important implications for eradicating child labor's strategies for Pakistan.

This study presents strong and robust evidence that in the long‐run trade openness raises the output of the exportable sector and increases the demand for child labor as well as the child‐wage. However, FDI is found to lower the incidence of child labor, indicating that because of low labor standards and a high incidence of child labor, Pakistan is not attracting a greater inflow of FDI.

This study provides several implications for the policy debate on globalization and child labor and end by suggesting that rich countries should restrict the sale of goods from developing countries that lack or do not enforce child labor laws. Yet many doubt the ability of trade sanctions to eliminate child labor.

This could be the first ever effort in describing child labor incidence with the help of VAR technique for Pakistan.

The main purpose of this study is to identify and quantify the relative importance of various socioeconomic factors and maternal care practices which may have significant role in determining child mortality at different level of child ages in Pakistan.

This paper examines the role of household, demographic and environment factors as determinants of early children mortality in Pakistan. A number of individual, household and local characteristics are related to the probability of child mortality. This study employed a sequential model which is based on a sequence of binary choice models for the conditional probability of choosing a higher response category.

This study identifies that mother feeding protects children from early exposure to diseases and ill‐health in different ways. It also appeared that mother's education is strongly related to neonatal mortality, infant mortality as well as child mortality not only through the improved child caring practices but also through other proximate determinants such as prenatal care, income and environmental contamination.

Social policies attempting to promote early initiation of mother feeding and utilization of prenatal care could make major contribution to the reduction of under five years mortality in Pakistan

Health care intervention programmes should focus on illiterate mothers whose children have all the cumulative risks due to poor health care utilization.

This could be the first ever effort in describing child mortality status with the help of sequential probit technique for Pakistan.

The aim of the paper is to understand whether children in home‐worker (HW) households in Pakistan and Indonesia are more likely to work than other children, and, if so, how this impacts their capabilities. The paper also aims to outline some policy implications for the two countries.

The data are drawn from two ad hoc surveys and country studies carried out in Pakistan and Indonesia in 2000/2001. The paper examines the incidence and reasons of child work and child schooling in home‐worker households, the work conditions, and gender issues. A bivariate probit is applied to analyse the determinants of child activity status.

Children from HW households have a higher probability of working. There is evidence of the feminisation of home work from childhood. This is dramatic in Pakistan while little evidence is found for Indonesia. In Pakistani urban slums the majority of children are working, but in Indonesia they are in school. The mother's education and per capita income/expenditure or assets in the household are important determinants of the child's activity status.

The model cannot use the control group for econometric analysis since the number of households and children interviewed (although randomly chosen) are not sufficient.

Collective action plays a role in the reduction of children “only working”. The number of hours that children work in Pakistan suggests that their ability to do school‐related activities is likely to be impacted.

Although child labour is common in home‐based manufacturing activities in the informal sector in most Asian developing countries research on child labour remains scarce. This paper contributes to this area of research.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain empirical evidence on the impacts of socio-economic and demographic factors on the fertility decisions taken by a common family in developing countries like Pakistan. Also, this study contravenes the conventional orthodoxy of childbirth decisions of a family by enlarging the canvas and conjectures the fundamental nexus amongst female’s education, fertility and contraceptive use.

The study is based on micro-level data, obtained from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (2012-2013) which is the third survey carried out in Pakistan. Demographic and socio-economic profiles of 13,558 ever-married women, aged 15-49 years, were randomly selected from Gilgit Baltistan and the four provinces of Pakistan. Three dependent variables are used in empirical analysis i.e. current use of contraceptives, total fertility and cumulative fertility. In order to estimate the probability of contraceptive use maximum likelihood, Probit technique is employed with ordinary least squares on reduced form specifications of total fertility and cumulative fertility models.

The empirical results proved the hypotheses that educated females practice more family planning through modern contraceptives which leads to a decrease in total fertility rates. Some significant links among females’ education, contraceptive use and fertility define the quantity – quality trade-off and opportunity cost of time. Evidently, female education provides maturity and awareness of family size which is necessary to take crucial economic decisions.

The empirical evidence suggests that maximum efforts should be made toward women’s education. The current standard of education in Pakistan is not enough to overcome the long-standing problem of excessive child birth. This could be done with the help of public – private partnership as the measures taken by the government alone are insufficient. The government should initiate some adequate measures such as education and awareness about contraceptive usage at the secondary school level that could be a vivacious step to support fertility reduction.

The framework used in this study provides a broader intra-household income–expenditure approach. With a smaller family size, the household’s income would be shared among fewer individuals. It is highly probable that parents would be more attentive if they need to look after a few children. That is the best way to progress their children with limited resources.

From the socioeconomic perspectives, educated parents plan the ideal family size which allows them to spend more on their children’s upbringing.

This study captures the magnitude of fertility decisions with the relevance of the wife’s education because the present practice in Pakistan does not allow higher education for married women. This is why this study could be used as a benchmark for further study in the same area.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the factors that influence the decision of married women (in the age group of 16‐60 years) to participate in labor force activities.

This is an empirical study employing the non‐linear maximum likelihood probability (probit) function on primary data (3,911 observations).

Besides other variables it has been observed that poverty remains an important determinant of female labor participation.

On the basis of this paper, a socio‐economic policy can be formulated for a developing country like Pakistan.

A development policy (especially considering the gender aspects) can be formulated on the basis of this research for the enhancement of human resource development for a developing and an orthodox economy like Pakistan.

This paper is beneficial to researchers, policy makers, and social scientists for the enhancement of the level of social welfare and equity through its findings.

The current study aims to use bioecological theory to examine the effects of different contextual factors such as husbands’ desire for children, visit by a family planning worker, media messages, and province level on women’s use of contraception in Pakistan. Two cross-sectional data sets were taken from the Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys (PDHS), conducted in 2006–07 and 2012–13, which included 3,811 and 4,871 currently married, lower socioeconomic status (SES) women aged 15–49 years, respectively. Using logistic regression, the results showed that women’s perception of a husband’s desire for children and visit by family planning workers were significant predictors of women’s use of contraception in both periods (i.e. PDHS 2006–07 and PDHS, 2012–13). Specifically, those women who had a desire for children similar to their husband were more likely to use contraception than those who either were not sure about their husband’s desire for children or whose desire for children was less or more than their husband. Moreover, those women who had at least one visit from a family planning worker during the 12 months prior to the survey were more likely to use contraception than their counterparts.

Though female labour force participation (FLFP) rates have been widely analysed across countries, the analysis of migrant women's participation has been consistently ignored in the literature. The few studies that have been conducted concentrate largely on sociological and anthropological aspects of migrant women (see Foner (1976)). This article will investigate immigrant FLFP rates, which are generally found to be different from their counterparts in the immigrants' country of origin. To evaluate the immigrant FLFP rate we analyse and quantify the nature and significance of its various demographic, socio‐economic and cultural determinants.