IMITATION MODELING OF SOCIAL INVESTMENTS IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION.

Abstract

Previous researches show, that social investments in early childhood (until age of 6) are very important, and one of the main types of social investment in this period of time is quality early childhood education and care services (henceforth – ECEC services). Social investments in early childhood have the highest return in human capital, especially for disadvantaged groups of the society. Literature suggests that positive effect of available and qualitative ECEC services can be observed in many areas of life, for example, through improved education indicators, increased participation of the women in the labour market, increased work productivity, higher birth rates, etc. However, the attendance of ECEC services varies considerably between different European Union (henceforth – EU) countries. The aim of this paper is to analyze social investment effect in early childhood in EU countries with high (Denmark), medium (Latvia) and low (Croatia) ECEC service attendance rates, so to find out if and how ECEC service attendance rate in these countries influences such indicators as rate of early leavers from education and training, school graduation rates and female employment rate. To see how situation may change due to the ECEC attendance rate changes in each country analyses was be carried out with imitation model options. This article describes the imitation model, which provides an opportunity to analyze the current situation and compare social investments between different EU countries. The model is designed using ISEE system STELLA MODELING and Imitation Software environment, and it is governed by the criteria that are based on literature studies, as well as analyses of statistic data. An additional benefit is that this model can be adjusted and used to evaluate other countries social investment tendencies as well. Research results show, that not all indicators that have been positively connected with ECEC attendance rate in previous studies have been positively influenced by ECEC attendance rate in chosen case study countries. Analyses showed that only in Croatia positive connections can be observed when it comes to all three indicators. Further studies should be carried out on this topic to get a deeper understanding on ECEC attendance rate effect on these and other indicators, that in the previous studies have been positively linked with ECEC attendance rate. Keywords—Child development, Early childhood education, Female employment, Social investment. IntroductIon Social investment is about investing in people. It means policies designed to strengthen people’s skills and capacities and support them to participate fully in employment and social life. One of the main policy areas of social investment is quality childcare [1]. Over the years literature and previous studies have shown that social investments in early age (until age of 6) has the highest return in the human capital (see Fig. 1, [2]) and their effect, mainly through quality childcare, can be observed in many areas of life both in long and short term, including [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]: Fig. 1. Return to a dollar invested in different levels of education [2]. education outcome increase (lower rate of early leavers from education and training, higher school graduation rates, etc.) social economic outcome increase (higher fertility rate and increased female workforce participation, etc.); exchequer returns increase (higher tax returns, etc.) long-term economic outcome increase (increased earnings and labour-force participation, etc.) health, social well-being and welfare dependency reduction (reduction in expenditures for the child welfare system, etc.) Print ISSN 1691-5402 Online ISSN 2256-070X http://dx.doi.org/10.17770/etr2019vol2.4075 © 2019 Katrīne Kūkoja, Feliciana Rajevska Published by Rezekne Academy of Technologies. This is an open access articleunder the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Environment. Technology. Resources. Rezekne, Latvia Proceedings of the 12th International Scientific and Practical Conference. Volume II, 200-204