Naved Hamid
Professor and Director, CREB
Lahore School of Economics
SOME THOUGHTS ON ASER
The Centre for Research in Economics and Business (CREB). Lahore School of Economics, aims to produce high quality research with meaningful policy impact. The focus of research at CREB is on political economy, social sectors, particularly education, health, microfinance and community driven development, and industrial innovation and agglomeration. A significant portion of the research in the last two areas has involved the use of secondary data sources such as PSLM (Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey), MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey) and CMI (Census of Manufacturing Industries). More recently researchers at CREB have started working with the ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) dataset. ASER is a unique and valuable resource for researchers working on Pakistan because of its nationwide geographical spread (i.e., 140 districts in Pakistan) and data on children’s learning outcomes on a yearly basis. Another unique feature is that it also provides both household and school level data – as far as I know this is the only dataset which not only has information on children’s learning outcomes, but also about their household and schools.
One of our students, Ms. Mahniya Zafar, who completed her MPhil from the Lahore School of Economics in 2018, used the ASER dataset for her thesis on the Impact of School Facilities on Dropouts in Pakistan. I asked Ms. Zafar about her experience in using the ASER data and she wrote that “It was great working with the ASER data for my MPhil thesis. I found the ASER Pakistan website to be user friendly and the data easily accessible; I was able to download it directly from the website upon providing the purpose of my research. I found the ASER team to be very efficient in responding to queries and keen on providing additional information (if needed). Working with the raw data files was also a pleasure; the files are clean, variables are labelled properly and all data comes with detailed code files that make it convenient for first time users to understand and navigate through the data. Thank you ASER. I would highly recommend students and researchers to take advantage of this rich and useful dataset.” Consequently, based on our experience, we plan to use the ASER dataset regularly for our research, as well as recommend it to our graduate students for use for their thesis.
Naved Hamid 
