The structure of social disparities in education : gender and wealth

Using internationally comparable household data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), the author investigates how gender and wealth interact to generate within country inequalities in educational enrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariate analysis to assess the partial relationship between educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household characteristics (including level of education of adults, in the households), and community characteristics (including the presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1) women are at a great educational disadvantage in countries in South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2) Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealth gaps are large in almost all of the countries studied. Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy female disadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger, and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbate the gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example, where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference between male and female enrollment for children from the richest households, the difference is 34 percentage points for children from the poorest households. 3) The education level of adults in the household has a significant impact on the enrollment of children in all the countries studied, even after controlling for wealth. The effect of the educational level of adult female is larger than that of the education level of adult males in some, but not all, of the countries studied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary school in the community has a significant relationship with enrollment in some countries only (notably in Western and Central Africa). The relationship appears not to systematically differ by children's gender.Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Early Childhood Development,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Poverty Assessment,Early Childhood Development

Disability, poverty, and schooling in developing countries : results from 11 household surveys

This paper analyzes the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries. Between 1 and 2 percent of the population is identified as having a disability. Youth with disabilities sometimes live in poorer households, but the extent of this concentration is typically neither large nor statistically significant. However, youth with disabilities are almost always substantially less likely to start school, and in some countries have lower transition rates resulting in lower schooling attainment. The order of magnitude of the school participation disability deficit is often larger than those associated with other characteristics such as gender, rural residence, or economic status differentials.Social Cohesion,Social Protections&Assistance,Gender and Law,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

The social origins of failure: morphogenesis of educational agency in the Cape Colony

This study is an investigation into the failure of dominant social agents to achieve social objectives through control over the educational sphere. The Morphogenetic Approach, developed by British sociologist Margaret Archer, is utilized to explore the educational agency of dominant groups in the Cape Colony over the period from 1652 to approximately 1860. The general objective is to gain greater insight into the complex relations between, on the one hand, structural and ideological factors, and on the other hand, features of social agents as collectivities who hold particular ideas and institutional positions in relation to the education service provided. This information is, then, utilized to explore the morphogenetic origins of failure, i.e. as emerging from the complex interaction between parts of the social system. This study makes a contribution by applying the morphogenetic perspective in a new context; utilizing the pre-colonial and other subsequent historical context to explore the pre-conditioning effect of past interaction on later interaction; revisiting well-known material to arrive at new conclusions from the morphogenetic perspective and introducing the morphogenesis / transformation of agency as source of failure; and it considers the implied strategic considerations for successful agency. The methodology of the study was determined by the nature of the morphogenetic perspective. In the way utilized here, the morphogenetic approach was a method for analyzing the relationships between components of a social system. The study contains two major divisions: Section A contains the development of the theoretical equipment for the application on the Cape Colony in Section B. The theoretical work involves separate consideration being given to the role of overall social features, institutional structure, ideational features and features of agent in the success/failure of agency. Particular attention is given to the changes that occur among the above and how it serves to explain the failure of agency. The general conclusion arrived at is that failure of agency is inevitable, if by success is meant the complete victory of one agent over others in terms of the achievement of the objectives set by such an agent at the outset of the interaction between the groups involved. Morphogenetic processes are responsible for modifications in both the context and the groups, and even the most powerful dominant agent cannot prevent the unintended outcome of interaction over a prolonged period of time

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

Increasing the supply of schools is commonly advocated as a policy intervention to promote schooling. Analysis of the relationship between the school enrollment of 6 to 14 year olds and the distance to primary and secondary schools in 21 rural areas in low-income countries (including some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa) reveals that the two are often statistically significantly related. However, the magnitudes of the associations are small. Simulating big reductions in distance yields only small increases in average school participation, and only small reductions in within-country inequality. The data are mostly cross-sectional and therefore it is difficult to assess the degree to which results might be driven by endogenous school placement. Data can be geographically matched over time in three of the study countries and under some assumptions the results from these countries are consistent with no substantial bias in the cross-sectional estimates. Although increasing school availability by decreasing the average distance to schools can be a tool for increasing enrollments, it cannot be expected to have a substantial effect. Other interventions, such as those geared toward increasing the demand for schooling or increasing the quality of schooling should be prioritized.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Teaching and Learning,Public Health Promotion,Primary Education,Education Reform and Management,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Education Reform and Management,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Education

Are there diminishing returns to transfer size in conditional cash transfers ?

There is increasing evidence that conditional cash transfer programs can have large impacts on school enrollment, including in very poor countries. However, little is known about which features of program design -- including the amount of the cash that is transferred, how frequently conditions are monitored, whether non-complying households are penalized, and the identity or gender of the cash recipients -- account for the observed outcomes. This paper analyzes the impact of one feature of program design -- namely, the magnitude of the transfer. The analysis uses data from a program in Cambodia that deliberately altered the transfer amounts received by otherwise comparable households. The findings show clear evidence of diminishing marginal returns to transfer size despite the fact that even the larger transfers represented on average only 3 percent of the consumption of the median recipient households. If applicable to other settings, these results have important implications for other programs that transfer cash with the explicit aim of increasing school enrollment levels in developing countries.Tertiary Education,Access to Finance,Education For All,,Primary Education

The effect of household wealth on educational attainment : demographic and health survey evidence

Primary Education,Earth Sciences&GIS,Economic Theory&Research,Roads&Highways,Teaching and Learning,Roads&Highways,Poverty Assessment,Primary Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Earth Sciences&GIS

Educational attainments in developing countries : new estimates and projections disaggregated by gender

The authors present new estimates of educational attainment in 71 developing countries for the years 1985, 1990 and 1995. They also project levels of educational attainment through the year 2020 by using the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's projections of enrollment and the International Labor Organization's projections of population by age and sex. The projections suggest interesting trends: 1) growth of stock in human capital is expected to be highest in the Middle East and North Africa and lowest in sub-Saharan Africa; 2) South Asia -- currently the least educated part of the world is expected to substantially augment its stock of human capital by the year 2020; 3) in most regions, enrollment levels are expected to remain lower for girls than boys; and 4) the gender gap in education may have risen in the past decade, this trend toward a widening of the gender gap may continue unless countries intensify their efforts to educate girls.Teaching and Learning,Earth Sciences&GIS,Scientific Research&Science Parks,Economic Theory&Research,Demographics,Earth Sciences&GIS,Teaching and Learning,Science Education,Scientific Research&Science Parks,Demographics

Assessing asset indices

This paper compares how results using various methods to construct asset indices match results using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes are quite robust to the specific economic status measure used. The measures-most significantly per capita expenditures versus the class of asset indices-do not, however, yield identical household rankings. Two factors stand out in predicting the degree of congruence in rankings between per capita expenditures and an asset index. First is the extent to which per capita expenditures can be explained by observed household and community characteristics. In settings with small transitory shocks to expenditure, or with little measurement error in expenditure, the rankings yielded by the alternative approaches are most similar. Second is the extent to which expenditures are dominated by individually consumed goods such as food. Asset indices are typically derived from indicators of goods which are effectively public at the household level, while expenditures are often dominated by food, an almost exclusively private good. In settings where private goods such as food are the main component of expenditures, asset indices and per capita consumption yield the least similar results, although adjusting for economies of scale in household expenditures reconciles the results somewhat.Access to Finance,Investment and Investment Climate,Population Policies,Debt Markets,Health Systems Development&Reform

Environmental degradation and the demand for children : searching for the vicious circle

The authors explore the hypothesis that--because of the important role children play in collection activities (firewood, water, grazing)--the demand forchildren may increase as local environmental resources are depleted, setting up a vicious circle between resource depletion and population growth. Using a large-scale household data set from Pakistan, with detailed information on fertility and the allocation of time to collection activities, they find that: (i) collection activities absorb a substantial part of household resources--firewood collection accounts for 6.2 percent of household expenditures, valued in collection time; (ii) collection absorbs a quarter of the time of children; (iii) women benefit when there are older children in the household; they work 2.6 hours a week less in household activities for each child aged 10 to 15, and 3.2 hours less for each child over 15; and (iv) there seems to be an inverse relationship between fertility and the availability of firewood; even after controlling for other determinants of fertility in reduced form regressions, the authors show that households that live some distance from firewood have more children, whereas households that live where firewood is more expensive have fewer children.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Development,Environmental Economics&Policies,Population&Development,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Youth and Governance,Housing&Human Habitats,Educational Sciences,Forestry

Child mortality and public spending on health : how much does money matter?

The authors use cross-national data to examine the impact on child (under 5) and infant mortality of both nonhealth (economic, cultural, and educational) factors and public spending on health. They come up with two striking findings: 1) Roughly 95 percent of cross-national variation in mortality can be explained by a country's per capita income, the distribution of income, the extent of women's education, the level of ethnic fragmentation, and the predominant religion. 2) Public spending on health has relatively little impact, with a coefficient that is numerically small and statistically insignificant at conventional levels. Independent variations in public spending explain less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the observed differences in mortality across countries. The estimates imply that for a developing country at average income levels, actual public spending per child death averted is $50,000 to$100,000. This contrasts markedly with a typical range of estimates for the cost-effectiveness of medical interventions to avert the main causes of child mortality of $10 to$4,000. They outline three possible explanations for this divergence between the actual and apparent potential of public spending: the allocation of public spending, the net impact of additional public supply, and public sector efficacy.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Public Health Promotion,Early Child and Children's Health,Statistical&Mathematical Sciences,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Systems Development&Reform,Health Economics&Finance,Inequality