Social Protection and Foundational Cognitive Skills During Adolescence: Evidence from a Large Public Works Programme

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Population Center Working Papers (PSC/PARC)
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Foundational Cognitive Skills
Ethiopia
Public Works Programmes; PSNP
Skills Development
Public Works Programs
Productive Safety Net Programme
Young Lives Study
Nutrition
Lifecourse
Behavioral Economics
Cognitive Science
Demography, Population, and Ecology
Economics
Family, Life Course, and Society
Nutrition
Place and Environment
Social and Behavioral Sciences
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This study was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD R21 HD097576). Thanks also to the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for funding Young Lives at Work and enabling this research (Grant no. GB-GOV-1-301108).
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Abstract

Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced Public Works Programmes (PWPs) to fight poverty. PWPs provide temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households’ incomes and to provide better infrastructure to local communities. While PWPs do not target children directly, the increased demand for adult labour may affect children’s development through increasing households’ incomes and changing household members’ time uses. This paper expands on a multidimensional literature showing the relationship between early life circumstances and learning outcomes and provides the first evidence that children from families who benefit from PWPs show increased foundational cognitive skills (FCS). We focus on four child FCS: inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning. Our results, based on unique tablet-based data collected as part of a 20-year longitudinal survey, show positive associations of family participation in the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia during childhood on long-term memory and implicit learning, with weaker evidence for working memory. These associations appear to be strongest for children whose households were still PSNP participants in the year of data collection. We find suggestive evidence that, the association with implicit learning may be operating through children’s time reallocation away from unpaid labour responsibilities, while the association with long-term memory may be due to the programme’s success in remediating nutritional deficits caused by early life rainfall shocks. Our results suggest that policy interventions such as PWPs may be able to mitigate the effects of early poverty on cognitive skills formation and thereby improve children’s potential future outcomes.

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2022-09-09
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Also published in the Penn Institute for Economic Research (PIER) (https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/penpapers/), Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania working paper series as Number 22-022: Social protection and foundational cognitive skills during adolescence: evidence from a large Public Works Programme, Richard Freund, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, and Jere Behrman. https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/penpapers/22-022.htm
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