Crises, Household Shock and Impact on Children

The literature includes research on different types of shocks, e.g. war (Jürges,2013), famine (Dercon and Porter,2014), orphanhood (Beegle, de Weerdt, and Dercon,2006), weather-related shocks (Shah and Steinberg,2017; Del Ninno and Lundberg,2005; Jensen,2000), and economic crises (Shafiq,2010; Duryea, Lam, and Levison,2007). The findings of these studies echo the same sentiment that shocks create a disturbance in the short-term and may have negative implications for the children in the long-term. The subsequent paragraphs discuss the findings in more detail.

Shocks are not unique to low-income economies. One example was the food crisis in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, which adversely affected education and the employment status of the cohort born between November 1945 and May 1946 (Jürges,2013). Specifically, the author finds that the proportion of children achieving more than a basic education dropped from 30% to 25% for the affected cohort, as compared to both children born just before and

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just after the food crisis. Furthermore, Jürges (2013) provides evidence that the percentage of people in blue-collar occupations (both men and women) was significantly higher in that cohort and fell to pre-war levels for the cohorts born after May 1946. The author argues that these differences are attributed to that cohort’s exposure to malnutrition in utero against other potential drivers, such as flight and expulsion from the East, selective mortality, and selective fertility. Similarly, Dercon and Porter (2014) provide evidence for the negative long-term impact of the Ethiopian famine in 1984. The exposure to malnutrition during the famine in the early years of childhood (12–36 months) is associated with height deficiency of approximately 5 cm, which in long-term lowered the children’s annual incomes by 5% over their entire lifetimes.

There also exists a relationship between health shocks and educational attainment. For instance, Beegle, de Weerdt, and Dercon (2006) studied the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Tanzania that led to widespread orphanhood. Their findings suggest that there is a strong long-term effect from maternal and paternal orphanhood on education. Children who became a maternal orphan between the ages of 7–15 years, on average received one year less education, whilst being a paternal orphan led to a 0.4-year education loss. The results depend on household characteristics, i.e. wealthier orphans are more protected from loss of schooling and children who have been fostered before the death of their mother or father have higher educational attainment.

According to Jensen (2000), volatility in agricultural incomes, both on-farm and off-farm (e.g.

due to droughts), are responsible for up to 50% variation in school enrolment rates. He also suggests that this agricultural volatility forces households to send their children to be fostered elsewhere, yet the negative impact on the schooling of these fostered children is negligible compared to non-fostered children. Considering the adverse long-term impact of reduced investment in education, the author calls for the state to use governmental interventions to mitigate the shocks on the household to put households in a position to maintain their level of investment in their children’s education.

The negative impact on schooling investment is not only a result of adverse weather shocks.

A positive weather shock, such as a period of higher rainfall, increases the gap in school enrolment of 5–16-year-olds between rural and urban areas in India (Shah and Steinberg, 2017). The lower enrolment in rural areas is because of the substitution effect, which lets children shift, voluntarily or forced, from schooling to work (in the labour market or at home) when increasing wages follow higher rainfall in a rural area. This effect is particularly

pronounced for low-skill and low-education jobs, which produces the (counter-intuitive) negative effect on school-age children by getting them out of schools and into work (Shah and Steinberg,2017). However, the effect of high rainfall is not uniform across all age levels. So, children affected in their early childhood (in utero to two years old) receive better nutrition in early childhood associated with improved cognitive abilities as indicated by their higher test scores, as opposed to children who did not experience positive rainfall shocks in early life.

Whilst Shah and Steinberg (2017) emphasise that higher wages motivate adolescents to discontinue schooling and to join the low-skilled labour force, Duryea, Lam, and Levison (2007) argue that economic downturns which force the head of a household out of work have a similar impact on children. The latter authors show that a four-month unemployment period for the household head increases the probability that 16-year-old girls, living in the household, drop out from school permanently and enter the labour force by 24% to 37%

(Duryea, Lam, and Levison,2007). However, it is hard to distinguish the persistence effect of the shock from the general economic impact. Thus, the long-term impact of the shock is hard to determine (Duryea, Lam, and Levison,2007). Shafiq (2010) argues that a macroeconomic crisis may also have some positive effects by dragging down wage rates for children. In consequence, children are less likely to substitute schooling with work. Further, and since a crisis often affects lower-skilled and less-educated labour more strongly, parents have a greater incentive to keep their children in school due to the higher return from investment in education (Shafiq, 2010). Against this, the reduction in parental wage income makes consumption of schooling more costly and increases the need for children to contribute to the family, known as the income effect. At the same time, the opportunity costs of child labour reduce (Duryea, Lam, and Levison,2007). Whether income or substitution effects are greater remains an empirical question.

In line with this, Ferreira and Schady (2009) discuss that, theoretically, in aggregate, the effect of a macroeconomic crisis can be ambiguous because of the interaction between the income and substitution effect. They see a household’s resource availability for human capital investment and consumption as the key determinants of the income effect, whilst the change in wage rates, reflecting the opportunity cost of schooling for children, creates the substitution effect. In addition, schooling as an investment in future consumption generates indirect utility in a dynamic setting. This creates a trade-off between first-period consumption, which increases working and decreases schooling, and second-period consumption, which benefits from higher investment in schooling. Hence, the optimal level of a child’s schooling will depend on the child wage rate and household income in period one and expected return from

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schooling in period two (Ferreira and Schady,2009).