Explaining urban-rural differences in educational achievement in Thailand: Evidence from PISA literacy data

Using the Thai PISA 2009 literacy test, this paper offers two contributions to the literature on the achievement gap between students in urban and rural areas. The first contribution relates to the estimation of the student-level education production function at different points along the achievement distributions. With the use of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, the second contribution demonstrates how much of the achievement differential between urban-rural students can be explained by unmeasured school characteristics. It has been found that the impact of student, family as well as school characteristics on student achievements vary along the test achievement distributions. Decompositions exercises at the mean find that about 45-48 percent of urban-rural achievement gaps are accounted for by the unmeasured characteristics of schools. The disaggregated decomposition exercise along the achievement percentile shows that these characteristics account for about 12-15 percent low-performing students and increase to about 61-69 percent for high-performing students.