Children’s skill formation in less developed countries – The impact of sports participation

Tim Pawlowski, Ute Schüttoff (), Paul Downward () and Michael Lechner

No 1412, Economics Working Paper Series from University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract: Previous research suggests that sports club participation of children in developed countries positively influences the children’s well-being, health as well as human and social capital. We use panel data of a cohort of 1,579 children in Ethiopia and Peru to test these relationships in less developed countries where access to work might be only to manual labor, access to education is more limited and daily-survival activities demand high physical energy. By exploiting the panel structure of our data in a specific way, we suggest that the effects flexibly estimated by propensity score matching are close to having a causal interpretation. The findings suggest that the impact of programs, such as those provided in sport, can have positive developmental impacts for children, for example, on human and social capital, but that the results vary by context.

Keywords: Social capital; Human capital; Well-being; Health; Group participation; Sports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D12 I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-hrm and nep-spo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usg:econwp:2014:12

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