The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity: Household Size and Household Investment in Education in Vietnam

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. We explore whether the coincidence of these two trends could be explained by parents making a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children, and whether government policies to control family size may therefore have accelerated progress in education. Combining micro data from three sources, including a new survey focused on private tutoring expenditures, we find that families do indeed invest less in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of (minor) siblings. This effect holds for several different indicators of educational investment—including the child's school enrolment, his or her attendance at private tutoring, and both the money and time spent on tutoring for that child— and is robust to instrumenting for number of siblings.