THE DETERMINANTS OF GRADE ATTAINMENT IN LOW‐INCOME COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL BANGLADESH

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the effects of child health on school enrollment and grade attainment in Bungladesh. It improves on past studies in a number of ways mainly by incorporating into its analysis the endogenous nature of child health. The results challenge the conclusions found in the literature. First, it finds that in Bangladesh, a child's health and his/her probability of being enrolled in school are at best weakly related. Second, it shows that once enrolled, nutritional deficiencies retard substantially school progress: Underweight children tend to be in lower grades than well‐fed children of the same age. It is estimated that a one standard deviation improvement in weight‐for‐age would be expected to reduce the grades behind by about 0.25 years or about 13.5 percent of the actual years completed. Finally, the estimates suggest that the weight‐for‐age indicator appears as the best predictor of nutritional status.     

RAISING EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT OF THE POOR: POLICIES AND ISSUES

Despite every policymaker's recognition, enrollment rates of the low‐income countries remain low. A simple framework of understanding educational outcomes is presented using a unitary model with an altruistic parent and a child. The traditional interventions, so‐called supply‐side policies, and recent innovation of relaxing constraints faced by households, the conditional transfer programs or so‐called demand‐side policies, are reviewed. In addition, recent trends on estimation technique are discussed. It has been argued that randomization is clearly the best for inference, however, one may still want to choose the optimal combination of randomized experiments and observational data, as the former requires more resources and time. This is particularly true for economics than other hard sciences, partly because of our inability to fine‐tune the control, and partly because of our lack of solid microfoundation than other sciences when an experiment shows unexpected results.     

GREAT BRITAIN

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