Child Schooling,Child Health,and Rainfall Shocks: Evidence from Rural Vietnam

Abstract

We study the effect of rainfall shocks on child schooling outcomes and on standardised height for age (a measure of child health) in rural Vietnam. We find that adverse rainfall shocks during pregnancy adversely affect children’s school entry delay and progress through school. Adverse rainfall shocks in the third year of life adversely affect both schooling and child health. These effects differ by region, as a result of constraints that reflect regional economic heterogeneity. We predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns over a worker’s working life.     

Impact of Shocks on Labour and Schooling Outcomes and the Role of Public Work Programmes in Rural India

The effectiveness of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on rural labour market dynamics in India has been widely debated in the literature. However, the impact of the NREGS on non-agricultural labour market and children schooling outcomes in reference to exogenous rainfall shock is unclear from the existing literature. This paper exploits the Indian National Sample Survey and rainfall measures from the precipitation archive of the University of Delaware to investigate the role of the NREGS in the labour market and schooling outcomes of children during shocks. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we focus on disaggregated shock specification and find a shock-cushioning pattern for the NREGS during negative shocks. However, there is an excess demand for labour during positive shock periods resulting from exposure to the NREGS. The implication is that the excess informal labour market opportunity translates to a reduction in school engagement for children. These findings summarily distinguish the role of the NREGS during positive and negative shocks respectively.     

Regional Returns to Education,Child Labour and Schooling in India

We offer evidence from India that higher regional returns to primary education not only increase the likelihood that boys and girls attend school but also decrease the likelihood that they work. These relationships hold only for the top three quintiles of the income distribution and mostly for children in the age group 10–14 years. The former result suggests that liquidity constraints may not allow poorer households to respond to the economic benefits of education. Policies that raise the economic benefits of education may increase human capital investments in households that do not rely on their children's incomes for survival. However, low schooling and high child labour will persist among credit constrained families unless these households are provided with the economic ability to respond to these benefits.     

Gender Differentials in the Payoff to Schooling in Rural China

Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan: Land Tenure, Development, and Dependency, 1895–1945. By Chih‐ming Ka. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Pp.xxi + 226. $54.95. ISBN 0 8133 8922 4

Cuba in the International System: Normalization and Integration. Edited by Archibald R.M. Ritter and John M. Kirk. London: Macmillan, 1995. Pp.xviii + 294. £45. ISBN 0 333 63335 0

Privatising Monopolies: Lessons from the Telecommunications and Transport Sectors in Latin America. Edited by Ravi Ramamurti. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. £45.50. ISBN 0 8018 5135 1

Global Change, Regional Response: The New International Context of Development. Edited by Barbara Stallings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp.xviii + 410. £40 and £14.95. ISBN 0 521 47227 X and 47806 5

Human Development Report 1995. By UNDP team and consultants coordinated by Mahbub ul Haq. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp.x + 230. £22.50 and £13.99. ISBN 0 19 510022 0 and 510023 9

Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste, and Class in Rural South India. By Karin Kapadia. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995. Pp.xv + 269. £37. ISBN 0 8133 8158 4

Agricultural Policy in Kenya: Applications of the Policy Analysis Matrix. By Scott Pearson et al. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp.xvii + 300 £35.50. ISBN 0 8014 3085 2

Anthropology, Development and the Post‐Modern Challenge. By Katy Gardener and David Lewis. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Pp.xv + 192. £12.99. ISBN 0 7453 0747 7     

Microeconomic Determinants of Income Inequality in Rural Pakistan

Inequality matters for poverty reduction. However, it is often unclear what policy could do to change the distribution of income as to date there is little quantitative evidence about the household characteristics that determine the level of income inequality and its changes over time. This paper sets out to identify these determinants by adapting a regression-based inequality decomposition technique and applying it to panel data from rural Pakistan. Land ownership is key to explaining the level of inequality, but not its changes. In contrast, higher education drives changes, but not the level of inequality. Household location affects both, reflecting growing differences in market access across regions.     

Reverse Gender Gap in Schooling in Bangladesh: Insights from Urban and Rural Households

This paper documents a reverse gender gap in secondary schooling outcomes in Bangladesh drawing upon several rounds of nationally representative household survey data. In terms of enrolment status and years of schooling completed, boys are found to lag behind girls in the rural as well as in the urban area. Within the urban sample, the gender gap is widest in the non-metropolitan area. These findings are robust to extensive control for demand and supply-side determinants of schooling and remain unchanged even when we use a within household estimator. We consider one hypothesis, namely gender-differentiated response to a conditional cash transfer program to reconcile the findings of this reverse gender gap.     

Gender Differences in Land Inheritance,Schooling and Lifetime Income: Evidence from the Rural Philippines

This article examines the difference in lifetime incomes arising from parental preferences in the allocation of land inheritance and investments in schooling between sons and daughters in the rural Philippines. Sons are preferred with respect to land inheritance, receiving 0.15 additional hectares of land, while daughters are treated more favourably in schooling investments, receiving 1.5 more years of schooling. However, differences in both current and life-cycle incomes between sons and daughters are insignificant. This suggests that Filipino parents allocate intergenerational transfers to equalise incomes among their children, without sacrificing efficiency.     

Gender Parity and Schooling Choices

Abstract

We examine the determinants of gender differences in schooling choices using data on 290,000 secondary school applicants in Ghana. Over a quarter of female students choose home economics as their preferred field of study compared to two per cent of males. We find that schooling choices vary significantly with academic performance and educational norms. Higher performing female students and those from districts with a history of gender parity in educational attainment are less likely to choose home economics. Differences across geographic areas account for more of the variation in schooling choices than observable individual, family, and school-level characteristics can explain.     

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.     

Computer-Assisted Instruction for Child Development: Evidence from an Educational Programme in Rural Zambia

This paper examines whether computer-assisted instruction has a positive impact on the literacy and numeracy skills of early grade students. An educational intervention implemented in Zambia integrated technology into classroom activity in order to mitigate weaknesses in teaching skills and address specific unmet student needs. Using a difference-in-difference combined with inverse propensity weights, results show that students’ numeracy and literacy skills are not significantly different from untreated community or government school students. At a third of the cost, the programme is the most cost-effective means of educating children in this poor region of Zambia.     

The Impact of Microcredit on Child Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Rural China

Abstract

This article assesses causal effects of formal microcredit on children’s educational outcomes by using household panel data (2000 and 2004) in north-west rural China. The unobservables between borrowers and non-borrowers are controlled in static and dynamic regression-discontinuity designs. The static analysis reveals significant positive impact of microcredit on schooling years in 2000 only, and no influence on academic performance for either wave. The dynamic analysis shows progressive treatment effects on both longer schooling years and higher average scores. Formal microcredit improves education in the longer term compared to the short term, and hence may help relaxing the grip of educational poverty traps.     

The Impact of Drinking Water Quality and Sanitation on Child Health: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

This paper examines the association between stored drinking water quality and sanitation on diarrhoea incidence among under-five children in Ethiopia. Using primary household survey data and microbiological water quality testing for Escherichia coli, our results show that uncontaminated stored drinking water and safe child stool disposal are associated with decreased child diarrhoea incidences of 18 and 20 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, neighbourhood concentration of pit latrine shows an increased incidence of child diarrhoea of 16 percentage points. To protect rural children from the risk of contracting diarrhoea, improving household drinking water quality and changing people’s behaviour towards safe sanitation practices is needed.     

Human Development in Pakistan and Bureaucratic Predicaments

Pakistan’s persistent ailing condition in the realm of human development raises major concerns about its governance mechanism. The problem seems to exist in the formulation of decentralization policies combined with delays and failures in implementation caused by political interests and inefficiency of the administrative machinery. This article attempts to highlight the current situation of human development in Pakistan using three basic indicators—education, health, and poverty levels—using evidence from data. It further develops a theoretical framework of bureaucratic involvement in public service provisions and problems faced by implementing agencies by identifying lacunas in the legislation of devolution plan.     

Costs and Efficiency of Quasi-Markets in Practice

The purpose of this article is to analyse the costs of introducing quasi-markets to the public sector in practice and to discuss if quasi-markets have been efficient when costs are added. Transaction costs, which will follow instead of hierarchy costs, are difficult to identify and therefore examine. In addition, costs will accrue from changing the mode of governance. The article concludes that creating quasi-markets produces some costs which reduce both technical and allocative efficiency, but what is most problematic is that those costs which are impossible to measure in practice are of greater significance.     

Sectarian Violence and Social Group Identity in Pakistan

Individual basic security is limited in Pakistan as the state is institutionally weak. One way to attain basic security is by joining groups who provide security and services. Consequently, groups not part of the political mainstream, to attract a following, must therefore show that they are sufficiently powerful to obtain concessions from established actors. Thus, by engaging in violence primarily of a sectarian nature, the Pakistani Taliban sustains itself as a unified force while also highlighting that it is a powerful group, which in turn it hopes would enable it to curve a political space and win concessions from the established elite. Using social group identity theory, club goods, and the economics of extremism, the article highlights why the Pakistani Taliban has increasingly attacked minorities and why more must be done to address sectarian violence.     

巴基斯坦恐怖主义的新特点及其影响

最近,巴基斯坦接连发生一系列恐怖袭击事件。与以往相比,恐怖袭击的方式和性质体现出一些新特点、新动向,显示出巴恐怖主义的本地化进程不断加速、扩大的趋势。