The determinants of teenage schooling in Jamaica: Rich vs. poor,females vs. males

The belief that schooling is an important way to reduce poverty and increase social mobility has lead to large government‐sponsored investment in education in developing countries. Jamaica has an impressive literacy and primary enrolment rate, yet the ability of its secondary school system to enhance social mobility and reduce inequality is limited. Regression results from a nationally representative household survey show that family background variables (parental education and income) are important determinants of secondary school enrolment, and income is the single most important determinant of enrolment in an ‘elite’ high school, with the impact being twice as large for females. Part of the income effect is shown to represent unobserved community heterogeneity. One conclusion is that the recent ‘cost‐sharing’ education policy of the Jamaican government, if applied selectively to the elite academic high schools, will fall disproportionately upon rich households.     

The Impact of School Meals on School Participation: Evidence from Rural India

This article assesses the effect of transition from monthly distribution of free food grains to the daily provision of free cooked meals to school children on enrolments and attendance in a rural area of India. School panel data allow a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to address possible endogeneity of programme placement. The results suggest that programme transition had a significant impact on improving the daily participation rates of children in lower grades. The average monthly attendance rate of girls in grade one was more than 12 percentage points higher while there was a positive but insignificant effect on grade one boys' attendance rate. The impact on enrolment levels was insignificant.     

An Assessment of the Impacts of Sri Lanka’s Programme for School Improvement and School Report Card Programme on Students’ Academic Progress

Abstract

This paper examines two education programmes in Sri Lanka: the Programme for School Improvement (PSI), which decentralises decision-making power, and the School Report Card Programme (SRCP), which was designed to provide parents and other community members with information on the characteristics and performance of their local schools. Using a difference in differences identification strategy, it finds the following results. First, the PSI programme significantly increased Math and English reading test scores among Grade 4 students, but not first language (Sinhalese or Tamil) test scores. However, PSI has had no effect on any test scores of Grade 8 students. In contrast, the SRCP had no significant impacts on any test scores in either grade, and further inquiries revealed that the SRCP was never really implemented. Second, the paper examined the impact of both programmes on teacher and school principal variables. Overall, few effects were found, and in some cases effects were found that one would associate with reduced school quality. On a more positive note, the PSI programme does appear to have led schools to form School Development Committees (SDCs), as the programme stipulates, to establish a list of school priorities and to implement projects funded through local fundraising.     

If you build it,will they come? School availability and school enrolment in 21 poor countries

Increasing the supply of schools is commonly advocated as a policy to promote schooling outputs and outcomes. Analysis of the relationship between the school enrolment of 6- to 14-year-olds and the distance to primary and secondary schools in 21 rural areas of low-income countries (including some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) suggests that the two are often statistically significantly related. However, the magnitudes of the associations are small: simulating large reductions in distance yields only small increases in average school participation, and only small reductions in within country inequality. There are a number of reasons why this result might hold. Average effects might mask heterogeneity in the impact by initial distance to the nearest school, as well as by economic status; the existing quality of schools might be low and the simulation assumes that this would be the average quality of new schools; and the cross-sectional nature of the data make it hard to rule out that schools might be placed where they are ‘most needed’ which would bias the results towards zero. Sensitivity analysis suggests none of these drive the result: the results suggest that expectations for large overall increases in enrolment as a result of school construction should be tempered. They also suggest areas for more research to guide policy: in particular on the interaction between school quantity and quality; the potential importance of demand side subsidies; and the cost effectiveness of different approaches.     

The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrolment and Labour: Evidence from Pakistan

Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how food price increases in Pakistan in 2008–2010 affect children’s school enrolment and labour. The causal identification relies on the geographical variations in food (wheat) price. The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrolment differ by gender, economic status and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labour because the transition from being idle to labour activity or from school to being idle is significant, particularly among poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural lands are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on child education.     

Impact of Cash Transfer Programmes on School Attendance and Child Poverty: An Ex Ante Simulation for Sri Lanka

For countries assessing whether to implement a cash transfer programme, an ex-ante evaluation is vital to assess its potential impacts. This study simulates the impact of alternative cash transfer programmes on school attendance and poverty among Sri Lankan children. We find that cash transfer programmes targeting poor children would be the most cost-effective way to reduce child poverty and encourage school attendance. If means-testing is not feasible, then programmes targeting the children in households with at least three school-age children would provide a suitable second-best solution. Our findings suggest that even a limited programme budget can provide significant impacts.     

Well Begun,but Aiming Higher: A Review of Vietnam’s Education Trends in the past 20 Years and Emerging Challenges

Given its modest position as a lower-middle-income country, Vietnam stands out from the rest of the world with its remarkable performance on standardised test scores, school enrolment, and completed years of schooling. We provide an overview of the factors behind this exemplary performance both from an institutional viewpoint and by analysing several different data sources, some of which have rarely been used. Some of the highlights are universal primary school enrolment, higher girls’ net enrolment rates, and the role of within-commune individual factors. We further discuss a host of challenges for the country – most of which have received insufficient attention to date.     

Junior Farmer Field Schools,Agricultural Knowledge and Spillover Effects: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Northern Uganda

We analyse the impact of a junior farmer field school project in Northern Uganda on students’ agricultural knowledge and practices. We also test for the presence of intergenerational learning spillover within households. We use differences-in-differences estimators with ex-ante matching and find evidence that the programme had positive effects on students’ agricultural knowledge and adoption of good practices. The project also produced spillover effects in terms of improvements of household agricultural knowledge and food security. Overall, our results point to the importance of adapting the basic principles of farmer field schools to children.     

Information Reduces Corruption and Improves Enrolment (But Not Schooling): A Replication Study of a Newspaper Campaign in Uganda

In the mid-1990s, Ugandan primary schools received only one-fifth of intended government capitation grants. A seminal study shows that a grassroots newspaper campaign substantially reduced grant capture and improved educational outcomes. We replicate these results, confirming that the campaign reduced corruption and increased enrolment. The latter outcome is only robust with an improved enrolment measure introduced in later work by the authors of the original study. We cannot, however, support the authors’ conclusion that lower capture enhanced learning. Finally, we show that the newspaper campaign allowed for a fairer allocation of teachers across schools, a result absent in the original papers.     

Wealth Inequality,Educational Environment and School Enrolment: Evidence from Mexico

Using data from the extended section of the 2010 Mexican census (2.9 million households), we study how school enrolment is associated with wealth inequality and with the educational environment the child is exposed to at the household and municipal levels. We provide robust evidence of wealth inequality as a negative predictor of school enrolment for children in primary, secondary and high school age ranges while a positive role is played by the educational environment. Through the introduction of interaction terms, we account for how economic and educational variables are intertwined at both the household and the municipal level, and we are able to illustrate the considerable heterogeneity in the role of adult education for households at different standards of living.     

Education for territorial peace in Colombia: what role for transrational peace?

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present the idea of a territorial peace and explore it in the context of Colombia. We locate our investigation in peace education, particularly in Colombia’s Catedra de Paz, and explore the adaptations and application of the iPEACES programme (originally the iPEACE programme, developed by one of the authors with Bevington in 2017) as a possible way of contributing to sustaining the plurality of many peaces in this and other contexts. We outline the Innsbruck school’s many peaces approach and Elicitive Conflict Mapping (ECM) framework in order to show how they contributed to developing the iPEACES programme – which is responsive to territorial peace in the Colombian context. We end by presenting limited findings from four surveys with teachers in Colombia who attended a taster day for the iPEACES programme in 2018. We discuss their contributions and perspectives, and the ways in which we feel the iPEACES programme might be taken up more widely in schools in Colombia and elsewhere.     

Achieving Equity in Health through Community-based Health Insurance: India's Experience with a Large CBHI Programme

This article analyses equity in enrolment, renewal of enrolment, and utilisation of community-based health insurance with special reference to the Yeshasvini health care programme. The analysis employs a primary survey conducted in rural Karnataka using a random sample of 4109 households. The study identifies quantifiable variables covering various dimensions of vulnerability and assesses their relationship with enrolment, renewal of enrolment, and utilisation using logistic regression techniques. The results demonstrate that inequities do exist even though they are less pronounced in utilisation than in enrolments and renewals. While community-based health insurance (CBHI) may be used as a mechanism to reach the disadvantaged population, they can not be considered as substitute for government-created health infrastructure.     

All You Need is Cable TV?

Robert Jensen and Emily Oster find that arrival of cable TV in rural India reduces women's tolerance of spousal violence, son preference and fertility, and increases women's autonomy, and school enrolment. These results are mostly replicated using their data and code. However, cable TV does not affect uneducated women. Theoretically informed index construction reduces the tolerance of violence effect, and weakens that on autonomy. We have statistical power concerns, and find errors and questionable assumptions in school enrolment constructions. Using our data constructions, effects sizes and significance are weakened. These results suggest that pure, statistical and scientific replication have merit.     

Does the Increase in Competition between Schools Improve the Quality of the Service? The Role of Educational Reform in Chile

We analyse the effect of geographic competition between schools on academic performance in Chile. The analysis controls for prior pupil performance, and a range of school and municipality characteristics. We allow for the endogeneity of voucher school location, using the number of local Catholic churches as an instrument. We find that a larger number of public schools positively affects the quality of education of other schools located in the same area, particularly amongst middle-class families and in middle-ranking schools. However, the number of voucher schools is associated with lower performance in neighbouring schools, which we attribute to pupil sorting.     

The national school of administration: training for the higher levels of the French civil service

The National School of Administration (Ecole Nationale d' Administration or ENA) in France is a unique graduate school whose program emphasizes applied problem solving and lngically corrects blutions. While this practical progrem (programme d' application) does not result in the award of degrees, it can stitutes the sole avenue of entry in to Iesponsible generalist administrative positions of the, French civil service.     

Effects of a Sibship Extension to Foster Children on Children's School Enrolment: A Sibling Rivalry Analysis for Indonesia

In this paper, we question whether and how the sibship extension to foster children, a common practice in many developing countries, affects children's school enrolment status. Based on Indonesian data, we show that children's school enrolment increases with the number of foster grandchildren in their sibship. Given that grandchildren fostering is associated with positive transfers from biological to host parents, this result reflects either a release of liquidity constraints in the host household or the uncommon preferences of host grandparents. Conversely, the proportion of other foster children in a sibship does not have any effect. The latter result's explanation depends on the reason children other than grandchildren are fostered.     

Citizens by Design? Explaining Ex-Combatant Satisfaction with Reintegration Programming

After armed conflict, there is often a surge in programmes designed to consolidate the peace. During the transition to peace, the quality of programme management has been argued to shape public perceptions about government and citizenship. What aspects of programme management are most important? What implementation failures have the greatest negative effects? We study these questions in the context of a reintegration programme for former combatants in Colombia. We find evidence that programme implementation has strong impacts on participant satisfaction, regardless of programme outcomes. This suggests that how benefits are delivered matters as much as what is delivered.     

How Important is the Capacity of Local Governments for Improvements in Welfare? Evidence from Decentralised Uganda

Decentralisation is often claimed to be effective for improvements in welfare and hence the reduction of poverty but empirical evidence is scarce. This paper seeks to gain further insights into the relationship between decentralisation and welfare by investigating the role of local governments' capacity for household consumption and school enrolment in Uganda. Using household survey data, it finds suggestive evidence that both household consumption and school enrolment are positively related with the level of capacity of district governments.     

The economic viability and stability of ‘capitalised family farming’: An analysis of agricultural decollectivisation in Peru

Abstract

The overall goal of this study is to examine if there is a dropout problem in rural China and to explore the effectiveness of a Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme on the rate of dropping out. To meet this goal, we conduct a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to assess the impact of the CCT using a sample of the poorest 300 junior high school students in a nationally-designated poor county in Northwest China. We find that the annual dropout rate in the study county was 7.8 per cent and even higher, 13.3 per cent, among the children of poor households. We demonstrate that a CCT program reduces dropout by 60 per cent. The programme is most effective among students with poor academic performance, and likely more effective among girls and younger students.     

Programme Participation Intensity and Children’s Nutritional Status: Evidence from a Randomised Control Trial in Mozambique

Abstract

Agricultural interventions are thought to have the potential to improve nutrition, but little rigorous evidence is available about programmes that link the two. In this article, we study impacts of an integrated agricultural and nutritional biofortification project, the REU in Mozambique. We first provide evidence on dietary impacts of the programme and then examine impacts of the programme by participation intensity. Using OLS and IV techniques, we find that more intense participation in both project components led to larger impacts. The results therefore have important implications for refining the design of future projects attempting to link agricultural and nutrition interventions.