Education and the Poverty Trap in Rural China: Setting the Trap

Abstract

Together with a companion paper to be published in the March 2010 issue, this is an ambitious attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap. The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind. Enrolment is high in rural China in comparison with most poor rural societies, but the quality of education varies greatly. The paper analyses the determinants of drop-out from middle school and of continuation to high school. It also examines the determinants of pupil performance, time spent learning, and educational expenditure. Poverty is found to have an adverse effect on both the quantity and quality of education—so contributing to a poverty trap.

Notes

The research was conducted while Li Shi and Deng Quheng were visiting the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, from Beijing Normal University and the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, respectively. We are grateful to Nina Fenton for her research assistance, to Chris Colclough for his comments, and to the UK Department for International Development (DfID) for financial support through John Knight's membership of the Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty (RECOUP), which is based partly at the Centre for the Study of African Economies in the Department of Economics, University of Oxford. We wish to thank the editors and two referees for very helpful comments and suggestions.