The causal effect of increased primary schooling on child mortality in Malawi: Universal primary education as a natural experiment

2016 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 72-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Makate ◽  
Clifton Makate
Keyword(s):  
Child Mortality ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Universal Primary Education ◽  
Primary Schooling

scholarly journals Does Maternal Education Decrease Female Genital Cutting?

2019 ◽  
Vol 109 ◽  
pp. 100-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabetta De Cao ◽  
Giulia La Mattina
Keyword(s):  
Primary Education ◽  
Education Program ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Maternal Education ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Female Genital Cutting ◽  
Maternal Support ◽  
Effective Instrument ◽  
Genital Cutting ◽  
Female Genital

Female genital cutting (FGC) affects more than 200 million women globally. Education is often depicted as an effective instrument for abandoning the practice, but causal evidence is scant. This paper considers the introduction of the Universal Primary Education program as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of maternal education on the probability that their daughters are cut. Using the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, we find no significant impact of the reform on the probability that their daughters undergo circumcision, which can be explained by a no significant effect of the reform on maternal support for FGC.

scholarly journals Length of maternal schooling and children’s risk of malaria infection: evidence from a natural experiment in Uganda

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. e001729
Author(s):  
Kazuya Masuda
Keyword(s):  
Primary Education ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
Malaria Infection ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Maternal Education ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Causal Effects ◽  
Effective Measure ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
Maternal Schooling

IntroductionAn estimated 216 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide every year. Cross-sectional studies have reported negative association between maternal education and child malaria risks; however, no randomised trial or quasi-experimental study using a natural experiment has confirmed a causal relationship between these two factors. I used the free primary education reform in Uganda to assess the causal effects of maternal schooling on children’s risk of malaria infection.MethodsMalaria biomarkers of children aged <5 years were collected from the 2009 and 2014 Uganda Malaria Indicator Surveys (n=5316). In 1997, the government eliminated tuition requirements in primary schools, which increased the educational attainment of the affected cohorts. Using exposure to the reform as an instrumental variable, I used a two-stage least squares approach to estimate the causal effects of maternal year of education on the probability that a child would contract malaria at the time of the survey. I also evaluated the cost-effectiveness of primary schooling as a malaria control intervention.ResultsOne extra year of maternal education reduced children’s risk of malaria infection by 7.5 percentage points (p=0.057) from baseline (34.9%). The length of maternal education was also positively associated with insecticide-treated bednet usage by their children. The results were robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. Primary schooling for women was a cost-effective intervention to reduce children’s malaria infection.ConclusionImproving access to primary education could be a cost-effective measure to reduce malaria prevalence among children of educated mothers aged <5 years in malaria-endemic countries.

Policies and Progress Towards Universal Primary Education

1981 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-563
Author(s):  
Mark Bray
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Universal Primary Education ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
Development Decade ◽  
Nations Development

In 1961, soon after the beginning of the first United Nations Development Decade, a conference of African Ministers of Education was convened by Unesco. The meeting resolved, inter alia, that by the year 1980 primary schooling throughout the continent should be ‘universal, compulsory and free’.1 As we have now reached that date, it is appropriate to review progress. A few countries have achieved the goal, but many others have fallen short. This article will examine the experience of the last two decades, and assess its implications for ultimate objectives and the strategies for achieving them. Despite national policy variations and divergent social and economic conditions, instructive overall patterns may be discerned.

Women’s Education May Be Even Better Than We Thought: Estimating the Gains from Education When Schooling Ain’t Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Kaffenberger ◽  
Lant Pritchett
Keyword(s):  
Child Mortality ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Basic Education ◽  
Women's Empowerment ◽  
Women’S Empowerment ◽  
Life Outcomes ◽  
Primary Schooling ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Financial Practices ◽  
Attenuation Bias

Women’s schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which both contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries, we show the association of women’s education (defined as schooling and the acquisition of literacy) with four life outcomes (fertility, child mortality, empowerment, and financial practices) is much larger than the standard estimates of the gains from schooling alone. First, estimates of the association of outcomes with schooling alone cannot distinguish between the association of outcomes with schooling that actually produces increased learning and schooling that does not. Second, typical estimates do not address attenuation bias from measurement error. Using the new data on literacy to partially address these deficiencies, we find that the associations of women’s basic education (completing primary schooling and attaining literacy) with child mortality, fertility, women’s empowerment and the associations of men’s and women’s basic education with positive financial practices are three to five times larger than standard estimates. For instance, our country aggregated OLS estimate of the association of women’s empowerment with primary schooling versus no schooling is 0.15 of a standard deviation of the index, but the estimated association for women with primary schooling and literacy, using IV to correct for attenuation bias, is 0.68, 4.6 times bigger. Our findings raise two conceptual points. First, if the causal pathway through which schooling affects life outcomes is, even partially, through learning then estimates of the impact of schooling will underestimate the impact of education. Second, decisions about how to invest to improve life outcomes necessarily depend on estimates of the relative impacts and relative costs of schooling (e.g., grade completion) versus learning (e.g., literacy) on life outcomes. Our results do share the limitation of all previous observational results that the associations cannot be given causal interpretation and much more work will be needed to be able to make reliable claims about causal pathways.

The Causal Effect of Polls on Turnout Intention: A Local Randomization Regression Discontinuity Approach

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Pablo Brugarolas ◽  
Luis Miller
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Regression Discontinuity ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Causal Effect

Abstract This letter reports the results of a study that combined a unique natural experiment and a local randomization regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of polls on turnout intention. We found that the release of a poll increases turnout intention by 5%. This effect is robust to a number of falsification tests of predetermined covariates, placebo outcomes, and changes in the time window selected to estimate the effect. The letter discusses the advantages of the local randomization approach over the standard continuity-based design to study important cases in political science where the running variable is discrete; a method that may expand the range of empirical topics that can be analyzed using regression discontinuity methods.

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