Teacher Truancy in India: The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives

Social scientists often emphasize how ‘culture’ and ‘social norms’ can be important determinants of economic behavior and development. This raises questions of the relative importance of economic incentives and these other more social variables, like culture, and of how they interact with one another. This paper uses some recent stylized facts concerning the problem of teacher truancy in India and constructs a simple model to illustrate the interaction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social.’ It discusses how this enriches our view of policy-making for improving economic performance. [This is text of the Vera Anstey Memorial Lecture, delivered by the author at the 88th Annual Conference of the Indian Economic Association in Visakhapatnam, on 28 December 2005.] BREAD Working Paper 112. [The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of Indian Economic Journal.]