Transcript Poverty and Undernutrition

Helps to separate out primary, secondary and tertiary.
1.
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Universal primary schooling (100% enrollment) is a generally
accepted goal
Secondary education may or may not be "essential",
Tertiary (university and other post-secondary) is generally a rare
privilege
Economists like to think of schooling as a production
process.
2.
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Inputs: are the time the student spends in school, innate ability
of students, quality of school and teachers, and parental
assistance.
Outputs: Total years of schooling attained, Enrollment rates (net
or gross), Skills obtained (literacy, numeracy, social skills,
scientific knowledge, etc.).
There are several indicators of problems in education:
3.
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Enrollment rates are not as expected (gross or net)
Low daily attendance
High rates of repetition
Low learning per year of schooling
Unemployment of school graduates
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Net vs Gross Enrollment:
Gross enrollment Rate:
◦ The number of students enrolled at a certain level of education as a
percentage of the population of the age group that officially corresponds
to that level.
◦ Can be above 100% if some enrolled students are older/younger than the
age group that officially corresponds to that level of education.
◦ Suggests there may be repeaters
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Net Enrollment Rate:
◦ The ratio of children of official school age (based on the International
Standard Classification of Education 1997) who are enrolled in school to
the population of the corresponding official school age
◦ Can be more meaningful because they focus on kids in the appropriate
age group.
School enrollment, primary (% gross)
gross
net
Country Name
2000
2009
2000
2009
Sub-Saharan Africa (all income levels)
80
100
59
75
South Asia
89
110
75
86
Middle East & North Africa (all income levels) 98
102
85
90
Latin America & Caribbean (all income levels) 120
116
93
94
Europe & Central Asia (all income levels)
103
102
96
95
East Asia & Pacific (all income levels)
109
111
93
94
Source: WDI
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Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
◦ Target 2.A. Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys
and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of
primary schooling
 2.1 Net enrolment ratio in primary education
2.2 Proportion of pupils starting grade 1 who reach last grade
of primary
2.3 Literacy rate of 15-24 year-olds, women and men
http://www.mdgmonitor.org/index.cfm

Goal 2: Achieve
universal primary
education
◦ Target 2.A. Ensure that, by
2015, children everywhere,
boys and girls alike, will be
able to complete a full
course of primary
schooling
 2.1 Net enrolment ratio in
primary education
2.2 Proportion of pupils
starting grade 1 who reach
last grade of primary
2.3 Literacy rate of 15-24
year-olds, women and men

Goal 2: Achieve
universal primary
education
◦ Target 2.A. Ensure that, by
2015, children everywhere,
boys and girls alike, will be
able to complete a full
course of primary
schooling
 2.1 Net enrolment ratio in
primary education
2.2 Proportion of pupils
starting grade 1 who reach
last grade of primary
2.3 Literacy rate of 15-24
year-olds, women and men

Goal 2: Achieve
universal primary
education
◦ Target 2.A. Ensure that, by
2015, children everywhere,
boys and girls alike, will be
able to complete a full
course of primary
schooling
 2.1 Net enrolment ratio in
primary education
2.2 Proportion of pupils
starting grade 1 who reach
last grade of primary
2.3 Literacy rate of 15-24
year-olds, women and men

Two related problems
◦ While access to school is important for achieving universal
primary education, children must also complete primary
school to master: basic literacy and numeracy
 Early school leaving rate: of the children who enter 1st grade,
what % are likely to leave early?
 Early school leaving rate: 25% in 2000 and still 25% in 2011
 Biggest problem in Sub Saharan Africa and Southern Asia
◦ Starting school late.
 38% of primary school children are 2 years older than official
age
 Children in poorer households will delay the start of schooling
 Worry about those who start late and leave early.
http://www.mdgmonitor.org/index.cfm

Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
◦ Target 2.A. Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys
and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of
primary schooling
 2.1 Net enrolment ratio in primary education
2.2 Proportion of pupils starting grade 1 who reach last grade
of primary
2.3 Literacy rate of 15-24 year-olds, women and men
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Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower
women
◦ Target 3.A Eliminate gender disparity in primary and
secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels
of education no later than 2015
 3.1 Ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary
education
 3.2 Share of women in wage employment in the nonagricultural sector
 3.3 Proportion of seats held by women in national parliament
http://www.mdgmonitor.org/index.cfm

Goal 3: Promote
gender equality and
empower women
◦ Target 3.A Eliminate
gender disparity in
primary and secondary
education, preferably by
2005, and in all levels of
education no later than
2015
 3.1 Ratios of girls to boys
in primary, secondary and
tertiary education
 3.2 Share of women in
wage employment in the
non-agricultural sector
 3.3 Proportion of seats
held by women in national
parliament
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Goal 3: Promote
gender equality and
empower women
◦ Target 3.A Eliminate
gender disparity in
primary and secondary
education, preferably by
2005, and in all levels of
education no later than
2015
 3.1 Ratios of girls to boys
in primary, secondary and
tertiary education
 3.2 Share of women in
wage employment in the
non-agricultural sector
 3.3 Proportion of seats
held by women in national
parliament
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Rosenzweig (1995): Why are there returns to
schooling?
◦ Under what circumstances will schooling improve
productivity in the market and in the household?
◦ Model: describes two channels through which schooling
enhances work productivity:
1. access to information sources (ability to read, for example
allows one to acquire new information from instruction
manuals)
2. improves the ability to process or decipher new information
(education teaches people how to learn)
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Rosenzweig (1995): Why are there returns to
schooling?
◦ Under what circumstances will schooling improve
productivity in the market and in the household?
◦ 2 Implications of the model:
1. The greater the gains from getting the input use "right“, the
greater the effect of schooling on output
 If work tasks are more complex, there is greater scope for misuse of
technology, substantial learning effort is needed to perform a new
tasks ⇒ High returns to schooling
 If tasks are simple ⇒ Low returns to schooling
 Ex: Traditional Agriculture vs Green Revolution
 Point: returns to schooling increase when production technology
increases the scope of learning
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Rosenzweig (1995): Why are there returns to
schooling?
◦ Under what circumstances will schooling improve
productivity in the market and in the household?
◦ 2 Implications of the model:
2. The returns to schooling depend on the amount of experience
with the production process
 Schooling enhances ability of farmers to learn from observations
about optimal input use.
 Learning from experience matters!
 Of the 3 cases, who do you think had higher profits?
 No schooling, no experience with high-tech seeds
 Schooling, no experience with high-tech seeds
 No schooling, experience with high-tech seeds.
 Point: Profitability increases more rapidly with experience for those
who have schooling.
 Point: Returns to schooling are higher when farmers also have
experience.
Other issues regarding returns to education
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Education of women
Brain Drain
Curriculum Relevance
Credit Market Failures
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Glewwe, Hanushek, Humpage and Ravina (2011) School
Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing
Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010
 Simple model of school choices
 Review of the Evidence (empirical tests of the above model)
 Paper reviews 79 empirical studies (only 43 were considered to be
high quality studies)
 Findings for impacts on academic test scores:
1. having a fully functioning school appears conducive to student
learning.
2. having teachers with greater knowledge of the subjects they teach,
having a longer school day, and providing tutoring.
3. having teachers that show up for work; teacher absence has a clear
negative effect on learning.
4. Randomized trials arguably provide the most rigorous evidence
5. there is little empirical support for a wide variety of school and teacher
characteristics that some observers may view as priorities for school
spending
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Glewwe, Hanushek, Humpage and Ravina (2011) School
Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing
Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010
◦ Findings for time spent in school: of the 43 high quality studies,
only 2 findings receive clear support:
1. building more schools increases students' time in school
2. in-service teacher training reduces student time in school
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Glewwe, Hanushek, Humpage and Ravina (2011) School
Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing
Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010
 Basic conclusion:
1. review of existing evidence suggests little in the form of "best policies"
that can readily be introduced through central provision or through
regulatory approaches
2. focus should shift from basic school and teacher characteristics to
changing incentives in schools and permitting more local decision
making
3. a continued quest for identifying the specific inputs of teachers and
schools from cross-sectional analyses of samples of convenience is
unlikely to lead to strong policy guidance.
4. For several classes of policy issues -- largely ones involving wellidentified programs and specific resources -- obtaining randomized or
quasi-randomized observations is key to instilling confidence in
research results
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Glewwe, Hanushek, Humpage and Ravina (2011) School
Resources and Educational Outcomes in Developing
Countries: A Review of the Literature from 1990 to 2010
final point:
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despite a large and increasingly sophisticated literature, remarkably
little is known about the impact of education policies on student
outcomes in developing countries.
There are 2likely reasons for this.
1. What works best may vary considerably across countries and even
within countries, which implies that future research should attempt
to understand which policies work best in which settings.
2. Much of the literature has focused on basic school and teacher
characteristics, when in fact the ways that schools are organized
may matter most.
 Such a conclusion implies that future research should focus on
how schools are organized and the incentives faced by teachers,
administrators, parents and students.
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Let's think about supply and demand for education
Demand for education:
◦ Would parents send children to school without compulsory
education? What constrains them?
The need for child labor?
School is too expensive?
The poor lack economic resources?
Social/cultural reasons: For example, a child "needs" to get
married?
 What do parents think/believe about education? What do they
expect education will get their child? Is it useful? What worries
parents about schools?
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Supply for education: problems
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Schools may be missing in remote villages?
Transport to schools is difficult (bad/dangerous roads)?
Shortage of well trained teachers?
Large class sizes?
What else?
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Let's think about solutions: Top down/supply side?
Top down or supply driven efforts to improve
educational attainment examples:
◦ improving infrastructure, building schools, making
education compulsory (many countries have done this)
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Supply driving results:
◦ Between 2000 and 2011: Net primary enrollment rates
increased from 83% to 90%
 from 60% to 77% Sub-Saharan Africa
 from 78% to 93% Southern Asia
 Worldwide, the number of children of school age who were out
of school fell from 102 million in 2000 to 57 million in 2011
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Is it worth it? There is a relationship between
education and income
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3 Top down success stories
Case of Indonesia (1974-1978) govt. used oil
money to build 62,000 schools.
◦ Public effort to build more schools in places where
education levels were initially low.
 Studies in Indonesia showed: Education and wages grew faster
in regions that received more schools.
 Schools caused an increase in education
 Schools caused an increase in wages
 Implication: Roughly 8% increase in wages for each extra
year spent in school: Schools were beneficial in Indonesia
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Case of Taiwan: instituted compulsory schooling in
1968 for 9 years.
◦ led to an increase of schooling of boys and girls.
◦ Infant mortality declined in regions where education increased
fastest due to this reform
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Case of Nigeria: used oil money to build schools
◦ led to a reduction in fertility in regions where more schools were
build.
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Top down problems:
Easterly (The Elusive Quest for Growth) argues:
◦ Top-down investment in education is not useful.
◦ Rich countries chose to be educated because they see a
country growing.
◦ But, internationally-driven investment to education are
waste
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Why? Why might supply-driven education not work?
◦ Poor teacher quality: If parents/community members do not
care, they won't put pressure on teachers to deliver: A
symptom is lots of teacher absence.
◦ Parents don't believe in what children are learning. Parents
will not want to send their children to schools if they feel
schools are not delivering useful skills.
◦ Children will not study and won't remember anything.
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Top down problems:
Other top down problems:
◦ Education quality is fairly low in developing countries (
High teacher absence, High student absence, Low
achievement):
 For example ASER survey in India finds that about 35% of
children age 7-14 could not read a grade 1 paragraph, and 60%
cannot read a grade 2 story in 2005.
 More troublingly, studies have found NO PROGRESS since 2005.
 Similar results in Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda, ….
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What is going on? What is the problem? Is it so hard
to teach children to read? And if not why are
schools not delivering?
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The illusion of an S-shape education poverty trap
◦ If a household divides resources equally among children, the returns to
learning per child may be too low, keeping the household in a poverty
trap.
◦ Put all resources into one child.
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Parents tend to believe that education is a lottery ticket:
◦ Give the “ticket” to the high potential kid
◦ Case of Madagascar:
 70% of parents thought that a secondary education could lead to a
government job.
 In fact, 33% of secondary school graduates get one.
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Parent tend to believe that returns to primary education are
low, and returns to higher education are higher
◦ Case of Madagascar,
 parents believe returns to education are: 6% per year for primary
education, 12% per year for secondary education, 20% for tertiary
education
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The illusion of an S-shape education poverty trap
Parents tend to believe that a little bit of education may not
be worth the cost
◦ Unless the child can get enough education to get a ‘lottery ticket’, it is not
worth it.
◦ If a parent has several children, they may treat them unequally
 make sure that one gets enough education, even if this means that the
other gets very little.
◦ These beliefs cause an elite bias in education by teachers, parents
and students
“The peculiar way in which expectations about what education
is supposed to deliver distort what parents demand, what both
public and private schools deliver, and what children achieve –
and the colossal waste that ensues.”
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An elite bias can cause parents to discriminate
between their children
◦ Case of Burkina Faso:
 a study found that children are more likely to be in school if
they do well on a cognitive test, but less likely to be in school if
their sibling's do well (conditional on their own cognitive score)
◦ Case of Colombia:
 a study found that when some kids were given a conditional
cash transfer (CCTs) to stay in school, other kids were less likely
to attend.
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An elite bias can cause teachers to discriminate
◦ Teachers will teach to the top of the class, even when the majority
of the students cannot follow what is going on
◦ If teachers feel that the majority of their students are not "up to
the mark" they will tend to blame the students, or the parents,
and lose motivation: low effort
◦ It may be difficult to convince teachers to change their practices,
even with training
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The Pratham experiment (with J-PAL)
◦ Pratham (NGO) was established in 1994 to support Indian
education.
◦ In the original program (Balsakhi)
 a young woman was partnered with students who were behind in school
for 2 hours per day (tutoring).
◦ The Pratham studies: evidence of teacher bias toward the elite.
 The program was effective in teaching all children
 But teachers were not very interested in taking it up, except in the
remedial summer camps
 Teachers can teach the basics, but they are not very interested to do it
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An elite bias can cause students to discriminate
themselves
◦ Students can easily get discouraged and demotivated when
they stop understanding: "school is not for me".
◦ Students can be particularly sensitive to situations that
reinforce the stereotypes that they are not good at school.
◦ Evidence of this:
 Huge student absenteeism: up to 30% student absence in some
studies
 Part of this is due to other reason (work, health)
 But in many cases, students are just despondent
 stereotype threat: Low caste and high caste student were asked
to solve mazes. Low caste students did more poorly when they
full name (with caste) was announced publicly before starting
the maze.