IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbecrv/v13y1999i2p211-56.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Household Income and Child Schooling in Vietnam

Author

Listed:
  • Behrman, Jere R
  • Knowles, James C

Abstract

The stronger are the associations between household income and child schooling, the lower is intergenerational social mobility and the less equal is opportunity. This study estimates the associations between household income and children's school success in Vietnam. The estimates indicate that these associations are considerable. For example, the income elasticity of completed grades is five times the median estimate of earlier studies. Moreover, this association is strongest for grades completed per year of school, not for completed grades, on which most of the previous literature has focused. There are some gender differences, the most important being a smaller association between income and grades completed per year of school for boys than for girls. This difference implies that schooling of girls is treated as more of a luxury (less of a necessity) than is schooling of boys. This article also investigates some ways in which policies relate to household incomes. School fees are progressive, but school fees are only about one-third of what households pay directly to schools and are a much smaller proportion of a household's total school-related expenditures. Total household expenditures paid directly to schools increase with household income less proportionately than do school fees alone, so the overall structure of such payments is less progressive than is the structure of school fees. Because school enrollment is positively related to household income, moreover, the structure of school fees is less progressive for the entire population than for the selected subset that has children enrolled in school. Further, the two school quality measures that have the strongest positive association with children's school success are much more available to higher-income households, meaning that higher-income households have greater school expenditures in part because they are obtaining higher-quality schooling and not because charges for the same quality schooling are progressive across income classes. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Behrman, Jere R & Knowles, James C, 1999. "Household Income and Child Schooling in Vietnam," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 13(2), pages 211-256, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:13:y:1999:i:2:p:211-56
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:13:y:1999:i:2:p:211-56. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wrldbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.