Impact of climatic shocks on child human capital: evidence from young lives data

ABSTRACT

This study attempts to assess the impact of two different climatic shocks, drought and excessive rainfall/flood, as perceived by households on child human capital across four countries: Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam – countries with diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Human capital, in this context, subsumes both child learning and health outcomes. The data source is the Young Lives Study and cross-sectional household data on the older cohort of children (between 14 and 16 years of age) are utilized, for the year 2009. The enrolment rate, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Cloze test and Math test scores are used as proxies for child learning outcomes. The health outcome variables being studied are the WHO-defined Body Mass Index z-scores and Height for Age z-scores. The overall objective is to study heterogeneity in responses to shock in terms of the development of human capital across the set of countries considered. Additionally, the study elaborates on the role of institutional help, during crisis, and the role of household characteristics in buffering these climatic shocks.

KEYWORDS:

• Developing countries
• drought
• floods
• investment in child human capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See also Maccini and Yang (2009), Hyder and Behrman (2014) and Dornan et al. (2014).

2 See Jensen (2000), Hoddinott and Kinsey (2001), Yamano et al. (2005), for Africa and Singh, Lakshminarayana, Fotedar, and Anand (2006) for India.

3 See Galab and Outes-Leon (2011), Dung (2013), Berhane et al. (2015).

4 These tests were conducted by the Young Lives Project, and are based on international testing standards. The tests were administered in local languages, and in some cases (PPVT test), were adapted to suit local cultural context. See the data description for details on the Young Lives Project, and Appendix 1, Cueto and Leon (2009) for further details.

5 For instance, PPVT is strongly correlated with the widely used McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities; see Campbell (1998); Campbell, Bell, and Keith (2001) for a comprehensive review of the PPVT test.

6 The Young Lives household survey included a section pertaining to the economic changes and recent life events of the household. In this section, households were requested to consider a list of events and indicate the ones they had been exposed to, since the last survey round. All climate-shock-related variables were binary, taking the value of 1 when the shock was reported, and 0 when the shock was not reported. It should be carefully noted that responses are based on perceptions, that is, they do not show whether a negative event has occurred or not, rather they show whether the respondent considers the event has affected the welfare of the household negatively. Hence, the reports of these shocks may be based on their coping strategy. Given that our objective is to analyse vulnerabilities associated with climatic shock, these self-reported responses assume particular importance.

7 Young Lives is funded by UK aid from the Department for International Development (DFID), with co-funding from 2010 to 2014 by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 2014 to 2015 by Irish Aid. The views expressed here are those of the author(s). They are not necessarily those of Young Lives, the University of Oxford, DFID or other funders.

8 Data for 2012 were not available for researchers at the time of study.

9 The 2009 questionnaire includes some instruments that were not a part of the survey and which were in fact included based on recommendations of the earlier surveys. Thus, differences between waves of data make longitudinal analysis less viable. Secondly, the nested school survey is available only for Ethiopia in 2009 wave for other countries, that is, for Peru, India and Vietnam, the nested school surveys were conducted in 2011–2012.

10 Galab and Outes-Leon (2011) also find evidence of a net price effect among the group of eldest sons in labour-intense activities (irrigation farming), resulting in reduced child involvement in work and increased schooling. However, their specification ignores the household or institutional buffer mechanism.