This Element reviews what we know about parental investments and children's human capital in low-to-middle-income countries (LMICs). First, it presents definitions and a simple analytical framework; ...then discusses determinants of children's human capital in the form of cognitive skills, socioemotional skills and physical and mental health; then reviews estimates of impacts of these forms of human capital; next considers the implications of such estimates for inequality and poverty; and concludes with a summary suggesting some positive impacts of parental investments on children's human capital in LMICs and a discussion of gaps in the literature pertaining to both data and methodology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Summary Building on long-term benefits of early intervention (Paper 2 of this Series) and increasing commitment to early childhood development (Paper 1 of this Series), scaled up support for the ...youngest children is essential to improving health, human capital, and wellbeing across the life course. In this third paper, new analyses show that the burden of poor development is higher than estimated, taking into account additional risk factors. National programmes are needed. Greater political prioritisation is core to scale-up, as are policies that afford families time and financial resources to provide nurturing care for young children. Effective and feasible programmes to support early child development are now available. All sectors, particularly education, and social and child protection, must play a role to meet the holistic needs of young children. However, health provides a critical starting point for scaling up, given its reach to pregnant women, families, and young children. Starting at conception, interventions to promote nurturing care can feasibly build on existing health and nutrition services at limited additional cost. Failure to scale up has severe personal and social consequences. Children at elevated risk for compromised development due to stunting and poverty are likely to forgo about a quarter of average adult income per year, and the cost of inaction to gross domestic product can be double what some countries currently spend on health. Services and interventions to support early childhood development are essential to realising the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Development economists study both anthropometry and intra-household allocation. In these literatures, the Demographic and Household Surveys (DHS) are essential. The DHS censors its anthropometric ...sample by age: only children under five are measured. We document several econometric consequences, especially for estimating birth-order effects. Child birth order and mothers’ fertility are highly correlated in the age-censored anthropometric subsample. Moreover, family structures and age patterns that permit within-family comparisons of siblings’ anthropometry are unrepresentative. So strategies that could separate birth order and fertility in other data cannot here. We show that stratification by mother’s fertility is important. We illustrate this by comparing India and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Children in India born to higher-fertility mothers are shorter, on average, than children of lower-fertility mothers. Yet, later-born children in India are taller, adjusted for age, than earlier-born children of the same sibsize. In SSA, neither of these associations is large.
•The DHS censors its anthropometric sample by age: only children <5yrs are measured.•We document econometric consequences, especially for studying birth-order effects.•Strategies that could separate birth order and fertility in other data cannot here.•We show that stratification by mother’s fertility is important.•We illustrate this by comparing India and sub-Saharan Africa.
Natural disasters can lead to significant changes in health, economic, and demographic outcomes. However, the demographic effects of earthquakes have been studied only to a limited degree. This paper ...examines the effect of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake on reproductive outcomes. This earthquake killed more than 20,000 people; injured 167,000; and caused massive losses to property and civic assets. Using data from two large-scale District-Level Household Surveys (2002–2004 and 2007–2008), we employ difference-in-difference and fixed-effect regression models to compare the outcomes across earthquake-affected districts and their neighboring districts during 5 years before and after the earthquake. We find that the earthquake led to significant rises in childbirth rates. It also reduced birth spacing among uneducated, tribal, and Muslim women, and the incidence of male births among rural women. We find considerable variation in the demographic effects of the earthquake across location, household socioeconomic status, and parental age and education.
Summary Background Substantial, but indirect, evidence suggests that improving nutrition in early childhood in developing countries is a long-term economic investment. We investigated the direct ...effect of a nutrition intervention in early childhood on adult economic productivity. Methods We obtained economic data from 1424 Guatemalan individuals (aged 25–42 years) between 2002 and 2004. They accounted for 60% of the 2392 children (aged 0–7 years) who had been enrolled in a nutrition intervention study during 1969–77. In this initial study, two villages were randomly assigned a nutritious supplement (atole) for all children and two villages a less nutritious one (fresco). We estimated annual income, hours worked, and average hourly wages from all economic activities. We used linear regression models, adjusting for potentially confounding factors, to assess the relation between economic variables and exposure to atole or fresco at specific ages between birth and 7 years. Findings Exposure to atole before, but not after, age 3 years was associated with higher hourly wages, but only for men. For exposure to atole from 0 to 2 years, the increase was US$0·67 per hour (95% CI 0·16–1·17), which meant a 46% increase in average wages. There was a non-significant tendency for hours worked to be reduced and for annual incomes to be greater for those exposed to atole from 0 to 2 years. Interpretation Improving nutrition in early childhood led to substantial increases in wage rates for men, which suggests that investments in early childhood nutrition can be long-term drivers of economic growth.
This study isolates the causal effects of financial literacy and schooling on wealth accumulation using a new household dataset and an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Financial literacy and ...schooling attainment are both strongly positively associated with wealth outcomes in linear regression models, whereas the IV estimates reveal even more potent effects of financial literacy. They also indicate that the schooling effect only becomes positive when interacted with financial literacy. Estimated impacts are substantial enough to imply that investments in financial literacy could have large wealth payoffs.
ObjectiveExtend analyses of maternal mental health and infant growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to children through age eight years, and broaden analyses to cognitive and ...psychosocial outcomes.DesignCommunity-based longitudinal cohort study in four LMICs (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam). Surveys and anthropometric assessments were carried out when the children were approximately ages 1, 5 and 8 years. Risk of maternal common mental disorders (rCMDs) was assessed with the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ)-20 (score ≥8).SettingRural and urban as well as low- and middle-income communities.Participants7722 mothers and their children.Main outcome measuresChild stunting and underweight (Z score ≤2 of height and weight for age), and <20th centile for: cognitive development (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), and the psychosocial outcomes self pride and life satisfaction.ResultsA high rate of rCMD, stunting and underweight was seen in the cohorts. After adjusting for confounders, significant associations were found between maternal rCMDs and growth variables in the first year of life, with persistence to age 8 years in India and Vietnam, but not in the other countries. India and Vietnam also showed significant associations between rCMDs and lower cognitive development. After adjustment, rCMD was associated with low life satisfaction in Ethiopia but not in the other cohorts.ConclusionsAssociations of maternal rCMD in the first year of life with child outcomes varied across the study cohorts and, in some cases, persisted across the first 8 years of life of the child, and included growth, cognitive development and psychosocial domains.
In many countries, males currently lag behind females in schooling attainment but females are still underrepresented in STEM studies. This pattern has raised renewed interest in the potential of ...single-sex schools for enhancing STEM outcomes. Utilizing the unique setting in Seoul, where assignment to single-sex or coeducational high schools is random, and with multiple years of administrative data from the national college entrance examinations and a longitudinal survey of high school seniors, we assess causal effects of single-sex schools on students’ math test scores and choice of the science-math test. We also assess whether single-sex schools affect students’ interests and self-efficacy in math and science, and expectations and actual choices of a STEM college major in university. We find significantly positive effects of all-boys schools consistently across different STEM outcomes but not for girls. We address one possible mechanism by conducting mediation analysis with the proportion of same-gender math teachers.
This paper outlines the economic rationale for investments that reduce stunting. We present a framework that illustrates the functional consequences of stunting in the 1000 days after conception ...throughout the life cycle: from childhood through to old age. We summarize the key empirical literature around each of the links in the life cycle, highlighting gaps in knowledge where they exist. We construct credible estimates of benefit–cost ratios for a plausible set of nutritional interventions to reduce stunting. There are considerable challenges in doing so that we document. We assume an uplift in income of 11% due to the prevention of one fifth of stunting and a 5% discount rate of future benefit streams. Our estimates of the country‐specific benefit‐cost ratios for investments that reduce stunting in 17 high‐burden countries range from 3.6 (DRC) to 48 (Indonesia) with a median value of 18 (Bangladesh). Mindful that these results hinge on a number of assumptions, they compare favourably with other investments for which public funds compete.
Abstract
This paper studies the effects of minimum wages in Indonesia around the time of birth on child height-for-age Z scores (HAZ) up to five years of age. Using variations in annual fluctuations ...in real minimum wages in different Indonesian provinces, it finds that children exposed to increases in minimum wages in their birth years have higher HAZ in the first five years of their lives. The estimated impacts are based on difference-in-differences models with biological-mother fixed effects and year-of-birth fixed effects and are robust to inclusion of multiple time-varying factors. The impacts are prominent particularly among male children.
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