Primary Education Expansion and Quality of Schooling: Evidence from Tanzania

Christine Valente

No 9208, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The rapid increase in primary enrollment seen in many developing countries might worsen schooling quality. I estimate the effect of enrollment growth following the removal of primary school fees in Tanzania and find that it led to large increases in the pupil-teacher ratio and a reduction in observable teacher quality, but rule out a substantial effect on test scores overall. These results are robust to instrumenting enrollment growth using predetermined fertility and migration decisions, and not driven by compositional changes. In urban areas, however, where baseline achievement was higher, test scores deteriorated where enrollment growth was larger.

Keywords: universal primary education; pupil-teacher ratio; test scores; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2015-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-gro and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review, 2019.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9208.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp9208

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().