The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity : Household Size and Household Investment in Education in Vietnam
During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality trade...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/06/17874788/decision-invest-child-quality-over-quantity-household-size-household-investment-education-vietnam http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15846 |
| Summary: | During Vietnam's two decades of
rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply
at the same time that its educational attainment has risen
rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the
hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing.
This paper investigates whether the micro-level evidence
supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact
making a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children.
The paper presents new measures of household investment in
private tutoring, together with traditional measures of
household investments in education. It analyzes data from
the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys and
instruments for family size using the distance to the
nearest family planning center. The estimation results show
that families do indeed invest less in the education of
school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings.
This effect holds for several indicators of educational
investment -- including general education expenditure and
various measures of private tutoring investment -- and is
robust to various definitions of family size and model
specifications that control for community characteristics as
well as the distance to the city center. Finally, the
results suggest that tutoring may be a better measure of
quality-oriented household investments in education than
traditional measures like enrollment, which are arguably
less nuanced and household-driven. |
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