| 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. We
investigate whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese
parents are in fact making a tradeoff between quantity and “quality” of children. We
present private tutoring—a widespread education phenomenon in Vietnam—as a new
measure of household investment in children’s quality, combining it with traditional measures
of household education investments. To assess the quantity-quality tradeoff, we
instrument for family size using the commune distance to the nearest family planning
center. Our IV estimation results based on data from the Vietnam Household Living
Standards Surveys (VHLSSs) and other sources show that rural families do indeed invest
less in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings. This
effect holds for several different indicators of educational investment and is robust to different
definitions of family size, identification strategies, and model specifications that
control for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. Finally, our
estimation results suggest that private tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented
household investments in education than traditional measures like enrollment, which are
arguably less nuanced and less household-driven.
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