EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Are Foster Children Made Better Off by Informal Fostering Arrangements?

Legrand Yémélé Kana, Sylvain Dessy () and Jacques Ewoudou

Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE

Abstract: Research on the effects of informal child fostering arrangements on the welfare of the children involved highlights cross-country disparities. Why may there be differences across countries with regard to the effects of informal child fostering arrangements? If in all countries reporting a high incidence of foster children Hamilton’s rule applies, then these cross-country differences are puzzling. Our model of child fostering arrangements builds on the fact that a child’s school performance is jointly influenced by his nutrition status and the time he has available at home to develop his learning skills and prepare for national school tests. Given this feature of academic performance, fostering out may become a poor parent’s best option for enhancing his child’s academic excellence, by trading off study time for better nutrition. We show that child fostering arrangements embedding this human capital motive for out-fostering make the foster child better off when nutrition is paramount to a child’s ability to achieve academic excellence.

Keywords: Child fostering; child nutrition; foster child's welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J13 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cirpee.org/fileadmin/documents/Cahiers_2010/CIRPEE10-09.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:lvl:lacicr:1009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from CIRPEE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:lvl:lacicr:1009