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THE DETERMINANTS OF GRADE ATTAINMENT IN LOW‐INCOME COUNTRIES: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL BANGLADESH
Author(s) -
GRIRA Hayfa
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
the developing economies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1746-1049
pISSN - 0012-1533
DOI - 10.1111/j.1746-1049.2004.tb00247.x
Subject(s) - underweight , demography , educational attainment , medicine , econometric analysis , malnutrition , child health , developing country , psychology , environmental health , pediatrics , economics , econometrics , obesity , economic growth , overweight , sociology , pathology
This paper presents an econometric analysis of the effects of child health on school enrollment and grade attainment in Bungladesh. It improves on past studies in a number of ways mainly by incorporating into its analysis the endogenous nature of child health. The results challenge the conclusions found in the literature. First, it finds that in Bangladesh, a child's health and his/her probability of being enrolled in school are at best weakly related. Second, it shows that once enrolled, nutritional deficiencies retard substantially school progress: Underweight children tend to be in lower grades than well‐fed children of the same age. It is estimated that a one standard deviation improvement in weight‐for‐age would be expected to reduce the grades behind by about 0.25 years or about 13.5 percent of the actual years completed. Finally, the estimates suggest that the weight‐for‐age indicator appears as the best predictor of nutritional status.