Child schooling and child work in the presence of a partial education subsidy

Southeast Asia

Philippines

Social Protection

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT)

J De Hoop, J Friedman, E Kandpal, F Rosati

2017

de Hoop, Jacobus, et al. “Child Schooling and Child Work in the Presence of a Partial Education Subsidy.” The Journal of Human Resources 54.2 (2019): 503–531.
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Pantawid Impact Evaluation. Dataset available at: https://viserdac.vsu.edu.ph/.

2017

Pantawid - Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program

2008-2011 (baseline and endline)

To support poor households (those with income less than US$2.15 per capita per day) by providing two transfers, one conditioned on child health-related behavior and the other on schooling.

Pantawid provides both education and health grants. The monthly education grant of 300 Philippine Pesos (roughly US$7) is offered to children aged 6–14 who attend primary or secondary school regularly (at least 85 percent of school days each month). The education grant is provided for up to three children per household and 10 months a year. The lump-sum monthly health grants of 500 Philippine Pesos (roughly US $11.50) are provided to beneficiary households on the condition that pregnant women and children up to the age of five regularly attend health clinics, children aged 6–14 receive deworming treatment, and the household member receiving the cash transfers (or their spouse) attend “Family Development Sessions” organized by the implementing agency, the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

A village-randomized evaluation was jointly designed by the World Bank and the Philippine Department of Social Welfare and Development. In October 2008, 130 villages were randomly allocated to treatment and control arms of 65 villages each stratified by eight municipalities. The number of villages was chosen based on power calculations for three primary outcomes: school attendance of children aged 6–14, household consumption, and health facility visits. Data for the PMT were collected in all 130 villages from October 2008 to January 2009, and in April 2009 eligible households in the treatment villages began receiving transfers.

School Attendance, child’s labor pay and location, types of occupation, combinations of school and work (only works, only studies, studies, and works, neither).

Randomized Control Trial

Study design/Identification Strategy: the authors exploit the cluster-randomized treatment assignment to identify the impact of the cash transfer program on both children’s education and work. They estimate the intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of the program by regressing the outcome of interest on the indicator variable for treatment while controlling for the municipality, which is the stratification variable, and age dummies where appropriate. They focus on children aged 10–14 as they are the youngest children eligible for the education grant for whom both schooling and work data are available. The authors further restrict the sample to children from households that are below the poverty threshold and therefore eligible to participate in Pantawid, which yields a final sample of 1,264 children: 637 from 411 households in treatment villages and 627 from 422 households in control villages.
Sample: The primary data source is a follow-up household survey conducted in October and November of 2011—two and one-half years after the start of the intervention and during the middle of the 2011–2012 school year. In each of the 130 villages in the evaluation, survey data were collected from a random sample of both eligible and ineligible households in treatment and control communities. The second source of data is used to build the baseline assessment of household-level demographic and socioeconomic measures through a PMT score. The authors use these data to assess the balance of key baseline characteristics across treatment and control communities at baseline.
Survey Instrument: This survey covered a range of topics, including school attendance by children aged 6–17 and work by children aged 10–17. Questions on children’s school participation were addressed to the child’s mother, guardian, or main caregiver, while the questions on work were addressed to the child herself. Children were asked not only about current work but also, albeit in less detail, about work before the start of the program for the calendar years 2007, 2008, and 2009. We use these recall data to explore baseline balance in child work as the baseline does not contain this information.

Children who were neither in school nor work in the absence of a cash transfer program not only increased school participation but also increased work for pay. This is likely because the cash transfer only provided a partial schooling subsidy, children worked to cover the shortfall in schooling fees. The findings contribute to the increasing evidence that the design of CCTs, in this case, transfer size, matters considerably in terms of achieving program goals.

Child Labour

Households

National

Children who were neither in school nor work in the absence of a cash transfer program not only increased school participation but also increased work for pay. This is likely because the cash transfer only provided a partial schooling subsidy, children worked to cover the shortfall in schooling fees.

The findings contribute to the increasing evidence that the design of CCTs, in this case, transfer size, matters considerably in terms of achieving program goals.

A few limitations of the study: first, the authors do not have baseline data to show definitively that children who were idle at baseline switched into paid work and schooling after the cash transfer (they attempted at building one using econometric skills). The authors also do not have data on the health outcomes of the 10- to 14-year-old children in our sample, and therefore can only rule out the potentially positive effects of health improvements through the cash transfer on child labor supply through an ITT analysis of children offered to deworming and by comparison to Prospera. The authors also do not have data on children’s social networks, so therefore we cannot completely rule out that going to school provided children with information about job opportunities, which, rather than the size of the transfer, led to the increase in child work