Search

Universal school enrolment of children aged 6–14 years has been a commitment enshrined in the Indian constitution since 1950. To attain this goal, the central government has set up a range of programs, such as incentive programs, teacher grants and infrastructure grants, while state governments share responsibility in implementing those educational policy initiatives. This paper reviews the progress of India’s primary schools over the period 2005–2011 as public educational undertaking shifted more from the centre to the states. Using two waves of the Indian Human Development Survey conducted in 2005 and 2011, we track the progress of primary schools in terms of infrastructure upgrade, teachers’ quality, the costs of education, enrolment and learning outcomes. We find that while progress has been made in terms of infrastructure provision and enrolment, other aspects have either seen no progress or have worsened over time, and numerical and reading skills of children 8–11 years old worsening over time. Better performing states are generally in the South and in the extreme North. However, in terms of learning outcomes, the abysmal results are nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries despite substantial improvements in education levels and economic development. One potential explanation for the persistence of this phenomenon is that individual household members like the mother derive large non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son and therefore prefer boys to girls. Qualitative evidence suggests that such benefits exist and may depend on the child’s age. This paper uses large nationally representative datasets from India and tests whether having a son leads to higher decision-making powers for mothers than having a daughter. Since the number and gender composition of children is likely to be non-random for families that want a son, I focus on first-born children for whom the sex ratio of girls relative to boys is normal. The main analysis also focuses on young children of up to six months, which gives parents little time to adjust desired birth-spacing intervals that could be systematically correlated with decision-making powers and child gender. The results show little evidence of consistently large female benefits shortly after birth, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after the first six months. There are also no large benefits for adult sons. These empirical patterns do not support qualitative evidence suggesting that women benefit from the birth of a son through larger decision-making powers in the household because of increased respect by other household members. The benefits also do not heavily depend on the child’s age, which is not consistent with a channel predicting a better bargaining position for women with adult sons who start taking over the running of the household. Overall, these results extend our understanding of individual-specific incentives for son preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper studies the relationship between mothers’ employment and children’s schooling in India. Using the second National Family Health Survey, the results of a multilevel probit model show that the correlation between mothers’ employment and their children’s schooling is negative. Women in poorer households are more likely to work but, given the negative correlation, their additional income does not seem sufficient to enable children’s school attendance. A sensitivity analysis on wealth deciles shows that this negative relationship disappears in urban areas and becomes weaker in rural areas at the top wealth deciles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper examines how women’s perception of the division of household assets upon divorce affects women’s well-being and child schooling outcomes in rural Ethiopia. Findings suggest that women who perceive that their husband would get all the assets in case of a divorce also tend to perceive less control over their lives. Implications of perceptions of unequal divorce allocations on child schooling are more striking: not only do children in households where perceived divorce allocations favor the husband do worse compared to children of the same age, but girls fare even worse than boys in these households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Divorce does not negatively affect the educational outcomes of children who were young when their parents divorced. • Children who were 5 or younger when their parents divorced are more likely to have attended primary school than their older siblings. • This higher investment is not sustained for long: these children are as likely as their older siblings to have completed primary school. • Children who were between 6 and 9 years old when their parents divorced are as likely to have completed primary school as their older siblings. • Young children may benefit from an improvement of the financial situation or an increase in the decision-making power of mothers after the divorce. This paper provides new evidence on the consequences of parental divorce for children in Africa. Using survey data that collected the detailed life histories of Senegalese women and of their children, we investigate how children's educational outcomes are affected by their parents' divorce. We use a sibling fixed-effects strategy that allows us to control for all the factors that are common to all children in a family, such as parental preferences regarding education or the level of education of the parents, alleviating concerns of omitted variable bias. We compare children who were old enough to have been enrolled in primary school at the time of the divorce to their younger siblings, for whom enrollment decisions had not yet been made at the time of the divorce. We find that younger siblings were more likely than their older siblings to have attended primary school. This higher level of investment does not persist in the long run: there are no differences between siblings when considering primary school completion. We find that custody and fostering decisions do not seem to mediate the positive effects on school attendance. Our findings are consistent with either an improvement of the financial situation (due to remarriage) or an increase in the decision-making power of mothers after the divorce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]