Gansu Survey of Children and Families Papers

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  • Publication
    Keeping Teachers Happy: Job Satisfaction among Primary School Teachers in Rural Northwest China
    (2005-05-01) Sargent, Tanja
    Numerous empirical studies from developing countries have noted that parental education has a robust and positive effect on child learning, a result that is often attributed to more educated parents making greater investments in their children's human capital. However, the nature of any such investment has not been well understood. This study examines how parental education affects various parental investments in goods and time used in children's human capital production via an unusually detailed survey from rural China. It is found that more educated parents make greater educational investments in both goods and time and that these relationships are generally robust to a rich set of controls. Evidence suggests that making greater investments in both goods and time stems both from higher expected returns to education for children and from different preferences for education among more educated parents. A second key finding is that the marginal effect of mother's education on educational investments is generally larger than that of father's education.
  • Publication
    Educational Resources and Impediments in Rural Gansu, China
    (2007-05-01) Hannum, Emily; Kong, Peggy
    This report seeks to provide a portrait of schools serving rural communities in northwest China, and to shed light on factors that encourage and discourage school persistence among children in this region. To achieve these goals, we analyze a survey of rural children and their families, schools, and teachers in Gansu province. The project interviewed children in the year 2000, when children were 9 to 12 years old, and again four years later. In part one of the paper, we provide a descriptive overview of the material, human, and cultural resources available in sampled primary and middle schools. Where possible, we note changes between 2000 and 2004. We describe the following types of resources: (1) basic facilities; (2) financial arrangements; (3) teachers, including their background, qualifications, working lives, professional development activities, satisfaction with work, and attitudes about school management and culture; and (4) classroom environments, as reported by teachers and by students. In this descriptive section of the paper, we highlight basic infrastructure issues, the complexity of financial arrangements at the time of the surveys, problems of teacher wage arrears and teacher morale, and the pedagogies and learning environments in classrooms, as reported by teachers and students. In part two of the paper, we investigate reasons for school leaving reported by village leaders, families, and children themselves, and analyze contributors to subsequent enrollment, change in attainment, and attainment of nine years of compulsory education. Our models of family, teacher, and school effects on outcomes show that higher socio-economic status children are more likely to show grade attainment, continued enrollment, and attainment of nine years of basic education. In contrast, the gender story is mixed: girls are less likely to be enrolled, but have not gained less grades, nor are they less likely to achieve nine years of education. This finding suggests that boys may start later or repeat more. It is possible that boys are more likely to be encouraged to repeat a grade to complete it successfully or to increase high school exam scores. One significant finding is that the introduction of school and teacher effects, by and large, does not explain away the advantages of children in better off families. School and teacher effects do not consistently matter across the three outcomes. Some interesting findings include that teacher absenteeism in 2000 is associated with less attainment between 2000 and 2004; children with better-paid home room teachers are more likely to attain nine years of school; and children in schools with minban teachers are less likely to attain nine years. However, there is not a consistent story of school characteristics that help or hinder childrenʹs persistence. Reports by village-leaders, fathers, mothers, and children themselves indicate that, along with socioeconomic status, children's performance and engagement are significant factors in school continuation decisions in Gansu's rural villages. Multivariate analyses indicate that childrenʹs early aspirations and performance matter for later outcomes. We close by discussing the most significant strengths and weaknesses identified among the school resources discussed in part one, and the most significant supports and hindrances to favorable educational outcomes considered in part two.
  • Publication
    Parental Migration and Child Development in China
    (2010-11-01) Lee, Leng; Park, Albert
    In recent years, China has witnessed a massive wave of rural-to-urban migration, which frequently results in family separations. This study uses panel data from a longitudinal study of rural children inwestern China to analyze the impact of migration by fathers on the development of children left behind in rural villages. Child development indicators include both measures of academic attainment, such as enrollment, years held back, and test scores in math and language; as well as measures of non-cognitive skills, specifically children’s internalizing and externalizing behavior which reflects their psychosocial development. To identify the effect of changes in parental migration on changes in child outcomes, we instrument changes in migration status with labor market shocks to village-specific migration destinations. Results suggest that fathers’ migration reduces enrolment by sons, has significant positive effects on the academic outcomes of daughters, but has negative effects on the psychosocial well-being of both boys and girls.
  • Publication
    Is Centralized Teacher Deployment More Equitable? Evidence from Rural China
    (2013-03-01) Han, Li
    Is centralized teacher deployment more equitable? This paper evaluates the teacher deployment centralization reform on teacher allocation in the context of rural China. Since 2001 the administration of regular teacher deployment has been gradually moved from the township (or local school district) up to the county government. Using the data from an impoverished province, I show that deployment centralization tends to exacerbate existing inequality in the allocation of teachers in favor of communities close to the county seat by exploiting variations in the timing of centralization.
  • Publication
    Do Mothers in Rural China Practice Gender Equality in Educational Aspirations for Their Children?
    (2007-05-01) Zhang, Yuping; Hannum, Emily C.; Kao, Grace
    More than 2 decades of economic reforms have brought great improvements in the quality of life for women and girls in China. Despite these improvements, in some areas, cultural values and norms concerning gender roles and traditional family structures still influence the values attached to sons and daughters and create strong incentives for son preference (Croll 2000; Li and Lavely 2003). The most striking evidence of the priority parents place on sons is demographic: the "missing girls" phenomenon of abnormally masculine sex ratios at birth. This phenomenon has become more extreme in the economic reform period (Banister 2004).
  • Publication
    Community Poverty, Industrialization, and Educational Gender Gaps in Rural China
    (2013-05-01) Cherng, Hua-Yu Sebastian
    This paper investigates community impoverishment and industrialization as explanations for educational gender gaps in rural China with analysis of a multi-province household survey and a longitudinal study of youth in one impoverished province. We consider attributes of poor communities that might shape gaps and the related roles of household and community poverty. Three major results emerge from this paper: community impoverishment, not industrialization, correlates with gaps; poverty and isolation shape gaps differently at different educational levels; and girls in relatively wealthy households fare better than boys at the transition to high school. Results suggest the importance of theorizing differences by educational stage and the need for research that conceptualizes the non-local dimensions of industrialization as potential considerations in educational decisions.
  • Publication
    Centralized Deployment and Teacher Incentive: Evidence from Reforms in Rural China
    (2015-11-01) Han, Li
    This paper studies the impact of deployment centralization on teachers’ effort and student achievement by exploring the reforms of rural education system in China. As regular teachers’ payroll was moved from xiang (or school district) up to county government in 2001, the power of deployment was gradually transferred along the same line. We exploit variations in transfer timing and use as comparison contract teachers who were not directly affected. Teacher data collected from Gansu province in 2000 and 2004 show that, the increase of regular teachers’ effort relative to contract teachers in those xiangs having centralized deployment by 2003 is smaller than those where the transfer had not occurred. Student test scores also had a smaller increase in centralization xiangs. Exploration into teacher allocation and wages suggests a likely channel: the implementation of performance pay is hindered as personnel interventions from upper-level government noises teachers performance evaluation.
  • Publication
    Do health sector reforms have their intended impacts?: The World Bank's Health VIII project in Gansu province, China
    (2007-05-01) Wagstaff, Adam; Yu, Shengchao
    This paper combines differences-in-differences with propensity score matching to estimate the impacts of a health reform project in China that combined supply-side interventions aimed at improving the effectiveness and quality of care with demand-side measures aimed at expanding health insurance and providing financial support to the very poor. Data from household, village and facility surveys suggest the project reduced out-of-pocket spending, and the incidence of catastrophic spending and impoverishment through health expenses. Little impact is detected on the use of services, and while the evidence points to the project reducing sickness days, the evidence on health outcomes is mixed.
  • Publication
    Poverty, Parental Ill Health and Children’s Access to Schooling in Rural Gansu, China
    (2009-09-01) Hannum, Emily; Sargent, Tanja; Yu, Shengchao
    As reforms to China's health care system have raised costs to users in recent decades, studies suggest that ill health has become intimately tied to social stratification as both a precipitant and a consequence of poverty. The problem may be particularly pronounced in China’s poorest rural populations. Focusing on Gansu Province, one of China’s poorest, this paper investigates the possibility that the ill health of adults also carries cross-generational consequences, through interfering with the education of children. Analyzing a survey of children in 100 rural villages, we find that parental illness is experienced disproportionately by the most economically vulnerable children. Moreover, parental illness can be linked to children’s educational access and experience in several ways. Children with an ill father are less likely to be enrolled than others; prior parental ill health is associated with lower household educational spending; and ill parents are more likely to report borrowing for their children’s education. Children with ill mothers are more likely to be absent and to work longer in the household. Children with ill mothers perform more poorly in math, and those with ill mothers and ill fathers are more likely to work for wages, on average, but these effects are accounted for by the deeper impoverishment of households with ill parents, compared to other households. Results suggest that ill health may have a ‘spillover’ effect on the long-term educational (and thus economic) prospects of the next generation. A change in this situation depends heavily on the success of new government initiatives to reduce health care and education cost burdens on the poor.
  • Publication
    Can insurance increase financial risk? The curious case of health insurance in China
    (2005-10-01) Wagstaff, Adam; Lindelow, Magnus
    The most basic argument for insurance is that it reduces financial risk. But since insurance opens up new opportunities for consuming expensive high-technology care which permits health improvements that are valued by the insured, and because in many settings the provider is able and has an incentive to exploit the informational advantage he has over the patient, it is not immediately obvious that insurance will in practice reduce financial risk. The authors analyze the effect of insurance on the probability of an individual incurring "high" annual health expenses using data from three household surveys-one a cross-section survey, the other two panel surveys. All come from China, a country where providers have until recently largely been paid fee-for-service (often according to a schedule that encourages the overprovision of high-technology care and the underprovision of basic care) and who are only lightly regulated. The authors define annual spending as "high" if it exceeds 5 percent of average income in the sample and as "catastrophic" if it exceeds 10 percent of the household's own per capita income. The estimates of the effect of insurance on financial risk allow for the possible endogeneity of health insurance in the panel datasets by allowing for a time-invariant fixed effect capturing unobserved risk that may be correlated with insurance status, and in the cross-section dataset by using instrumental variables, where availability of and eligibility for health insurance are used as instruments. The results suggest that during the 1990s China's government and labor insurance schemes increased financial risk associated with household health care spending, but that the rural cooperative medical scheme significantly reduced financial risk in some areas but increased it in others (though not significantly). From the results, it appears that China's new health insurance schemes (private schemes, including coverage of schoolchildren) have also increased the risk of high levels of out-of-pocket spending on health. Where the authors find evidence of health insurance increasing the risk of "high" out-of-pocket expenses, the marginal effect is of the order of 15-20 percent; in the case of "catastrophic" expenses, it is even larger.