By G. Pasini, Ca' Foscari, University of Venezia; A. Gebremarian, Ca' Foscari, University of Venezia; E. Lodigiani, University of Padua, Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano, University of Milan
Aspirations can be thought of as reference points where individuals aim to achieve and play an important role in the decision-making process of individuals. Children’s educational aspirations are important predictors of educational attainment and of occupational success, and expected to shape long-term outcomes such as labour market characteristics. However, aspirations can be affected by whether an individual is poor or rich. Studies document that though the poor and the rich face the same behavioural bias, poverty may exacerbate the behavioural bias and may lead to aspiration failure. Safety-net programs in developing countries not only smooth consumption, but also bring households out of the chronic poverty. It is, therefore, appealing to explore whether the introduction of large-scale safety-net programs affect children’s educational aspirations.
This paper evaluates the impacts of the Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), launched by the government of Ethiopia in 2005/06 to support food insecure rural households, on children's educational aspirations.
We use a longitudinal data obtained from Young Lives Ethiopia. Young Lives is a research project tracking the lives of 12,000 children in four countries. We use the older cohort and the rural sample. We applied a difference-in-difference methodology with fixed effects as baseline regression on the "full sample" and we control for several covariates. We also use matching techniques to further curb the comparison groups. The differences-in-differences estimation is conducted not only for the 2009 sample, three years after the commencement of the program, but also combining the 2009 and 2013 sample and whether the impact is different for the graduated households.
The results convey significant and positive impacts of PSNP on aspirations and suggest that the program lifts up children's educational aspirations. In our preferred specification, the immediate effect of the program is to increase by 0.87 years of education aspirations of children. As the vast majority of the population in rural Ethiopia depends on a small agricultural livelihood, food insecurity, caused mostly by natural calamities, is a threat to the rural households who mostly depend on rain-fed agriculture. Our results imply that small transfers may mean a lot for the food insecure rural households and can have important spillover effects on education.
We also look at the impacts of PSNP combining the 2009 and 2013 sample and whether it is different for the PSNP graduated households, in order to assess whether the program has a long-run effect on aspirations. The results reveal that the impact of the program is significant once we control for shocks indicating that since the post-intervention period is longer now, it is important to control for exogenous shocks to family resources, as they may confound the effect of the policy intervention but the effect of the program is not different for the households who are graduated from the program.
Newsletter n. 11| December 2018- Download PDF
