The effect of non-personnel resources on educational outcomes: Evidence from South Africa

Miquel Pellicer and Patrizio Piraino

No 144, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: Little credible evidence exists on the effect of material resources on school quality in developing countries. This paper studies the impact of non-personnel funding on educational outcomes exploiting the peculiar way in which these resources are allocated in South Africa. Government funding follows quintiles constructed on the basis of school poverty scores. This creates discrete jumps in the allocation of funding and we use a regression discontinuity approach to analyze its effects on school outcomes at the end of high school. Our results show a small but positive effect of resources on student throughput during the last years of high school, and on the number of students writing the matriculation exam. However, additional resources do not translate into a higher number of successful exams, leading to an overall negative effect on pass rates. We suggest that these findings may have to do with schools reacting to the per-pupil nature of funding.

Keywords: Non-personnel resources; education; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Nonpersonnel Resources on Educational Outcomes: Evidence from South Africa (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ldr:wpaper:144

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