Contextual Effects of Education on Poverty in Malawi

Richard Mussa

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The paper uses Malawian data from the Third Integrated Household Survey to investigate the presence and pattern of contextual effects of community level education on household poverty. These contextual effects reflect the presence of education externalities at the community level. I use an adaptation of the Hausman-Taylor estimator for hierchical models which controls for level-2 endogeneity of community schooling. The results show that regardless of gender, there is a significant positive effect of community level education on household welfare in rural and urban areas which is over and above that arising from education within the household. These externalities of community level education are larger for females than males. The paper finds that the return to within household education is smaller in magnitude than the community level externality of education. These findings are robust to alternative definitions of schooling and level of aggregation. The paper also finds that in both rural and urban areas, least educated households enjoy significantly larger benefits from increases in female and male years of schooling at the community level than the most educated households. This means that community level schooling not only spillovers to the rest of the community membership in terms of improved living standards, but also the positive education spillovers on household welfare are equality-inducing.

Keywords: Contextual effects; externalities; Malawi (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/75976/1/MPRA_paper_75976.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:75976

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().