Impact Evaluation and Policy Research

This paper seeks to find an empirical explanation of Vietnam's outstanding performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012. Only a few developing countries participate in the assessment. Those who do, with the unique exception of Vietnam, are typically clustered at the lower end of the range of the Programme for International student Assessment scores.

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.

Building on the earlier work, this paper provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam in several aspects, including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 where data are available.

This paper examines the effect of parental disability on school enrollment and educational performance for children in the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey. Results from instrumental-variables regressions indicate that children of parents with a disability have a lower enrollment rate in primary and secondary school of about 8 percentage points: 73 percent compared with 81 percent. However, the association of parental disability with educational performance is small and not statistically significant.

This paper analyzes the impact of the conflict on the level and access to education of boys and girls in Timor Leste. The authors examine the short-term impact of the 1999 violence on school attendance and grade deficit rates in 2001, and the longer-term impact of the conflict on primary school completion of cohorts of children observed in 2007. They compare the educational impact of the 1999 wave of violence with the impact of other periods of high-intensity violence during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation. The short-term effects of the conflict are mixed.

Solomon Islands need new sources of growth to open opportunities for its young and rapidly expanding population. Firms report that if they could find employees with the right skills they could add over 50 percent more jobs. Yet only about 20 percent of 15-24 year old Solomon Islanders are employed1, while over 40 percent of youth are inactive. Seven out of every ten Solomon Islanders are under 293. There is a serious skills deficit in Solomon Islands, constraining its people from taking advantage of the economic opportunities available to them.

[Impact Evaluation] This paper examines the long-term impacts of improved school quality at the elementary school stage on subsequent schooling investments and labor market outcomes using unique data from a recent survey that tracked students in the Philippines. The empirical results, which are based on a comparison of students who graduated from schools located in adjacent treatment and control areas before and after a school intervention, show significant differences in subsequent schooling investments, migration, and labor market earnings between females and males.

[Impact Evaluation] This paper examines the impact of a large supply-side education intervention in the Philippines, the Third Elementary Education Project, on students' national achievement test scores. It finds that the program significantly increased student test scores at grades 4 to 6. The estimation indicates that two-year exposure to the program increases test scores by about 4.5 to 5 score points. Interestingly, the mathematics score is more responsive to the education reform than are other subjects.

This paper examines wage dynamics and turnover using tracking data of adolescents from the Philippines. The analysis uses individual test scores in grade 6 to proxy abilities.

This paper examines inequality patterns of school and teacher resources as well as student performance in the Philippines. School and teacher resources, measured by pupil classroom and teacher ratios and per-pupil teacher salary, became more unequal over time. Strikingly, a large portion of the variation is attributed to their within-division distributions, especially the non-city areas in each province (rural schools), where pupil classroom and teacher ratios have significantly positive returns in terms of student test scores.