Child schooling, child health and rainfall shocks: evidence from rural Vietnam
Thuan Q. Thai and
Evangelos Falaris
Additional contact information
Thuan Q. Thai: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
No WP-2011-011, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Abstract:
We study the effect of early life conditions, proxied by rainfall shocks, on schooling and height in rural Vietnam. Our measure of rainfall shock is defined as deviations from the long-run average. Many Vietnamese rural dwellers engage in rain-fed crop production, mostly irrigated paddy rice. Sufficient annual rainfall could play an important role in the harvest and thus, the household income. Nutritional deficiencies resulting from the household's income shocks may have negative consequences on health. We find that a negative rainfall shock during gestation delays school entry and slows progress through school. In addition, a negative rainfall shock in the third year of life affects adversely both schooling and height. The effects differ by region in ways that reflect differing constraints on families that are shaped by regional economic heterogeneity. We predict that policies that help rural families smooth income shocks will result in increases in human capital and in substantial cumulative returns in productivity over the life course.
Keywords: Vietnam; child nutrition; early childhood; school enrollment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2011-011.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Child Schooling, Child Health, and Rainfall Shocks: Evidence from Rural Vietnam (2014) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2011-011
DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2011-011
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Wilhelm ().