To school or not to school : the impact of child nutrition on school participation in Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

This paper investigates determinants of school participation in northern Ethiopia using cross-sectional data from 2010, giving particular attention to the role of health and nutrition. It attempts to solve the problem of endogeneity in child health, and by doing so compliments on many of the previous studies which have failed to consider this. Instrumental variable and recursive bivariate probit models are used in order to assess the robustness of the estimates of the effect of child nutritional status, as measured by height-for-age z-score, on school participation. The paper finds that children who are stunted have a statistically higher probability of attending school than children who are not. The findings also suggest that ownership of irrigated land and the amount of livestock holding have a negative effect on the propensity of school participation. Seen together, these findings indicate that child labor and these input factors are complementary, and that parents prefer having the healthy children working on the farm, i.e., that the opportunity cost of schooling decreases with worse nutritional status, since malnutrition adversely affects child labor productivity.