the practicalities of doing this are daunting. Incomes are difficult to ascertain reliably in
most developing countries, the costs of administration may be such as to absorb much
of the gain from charging fees (Ainsworth 1984); school staff are ill-equipped to make
discriminatory judgements about the wealth of families and unable to enforce payment
without encouraging drop-out and souring relationships with parents whose cooperation
they need. The political difficulties of introducing fees, whether they are means tested
or not, should not be under estimated.
It has been contended that a situation of low user charges and a low level of service
may be worse from an equity point of view than one with high user charges and an
expanded supply. Thobani (1983) has argued this in his work on Malawi. Where there
is excess demand for school places and insufficient public finance some individuals are
denied the service and/or quality suffers. The rich suffer least. Services are denied to
marginal areas first, selection through examinations into limited numbers of schools
correlates positively with the socio-economic background of students. The proposition
is that there is an optimal interim level of user charges that maximises the opportunities
for expansion and quality improvement at the lower levels (which benefit the poor
most) without a significant deterioration in their limited access.
This is a convenient if not very convincing argument that posits equity in a parabolic
kind of relationship with user fees rather than as continuous linear variable. It is
conceivable that this might hold where supply is greatly restricted and there is great
unsatisfied demand and high rates of return for the successful. But it seems equally
plausible that demand is not sufficiently inelastic for user fees to have little impact on
participation rates, which is a requirement of the model. The supporting evidence
offered is that primary enrolment rates (but not secondary) are highest in the north of
Malawi (100%) which is the poorest region, and lower in the richer central (52%) and
southern (56%) regions. This does indicate that enrolment is not simply a function of
wealth. It does not exclude the likely probability that within those regions the poorest
groups will decrease their relative proportion of enrolments with the introduction of
user fees.
From another study based on Malawi data (Tan, Lee and Mingat 1984) it is clear that
progressive increases in school fees are associated with declining expectations of
continued enrolment. The proportion likely to continue is higher among students with
better educated parents, from high asset owning families, from urban centres, and from
more developed areas of the country. Fathers' annual income has a positive effect on
continued schooling at all projected levels of fee increase, though its influence appears
to diminish at primary level as fees are raised. Willingness to pay increased fees varies
directly with socio-economic background in this study. The differences between
expected participation rates of high and low asset owning families are closely related to
levels of projected fee increase. Studies of this kind have difficulties separating the
independent effect of fees on enrolments since they generally only cover one or two