Hai-Anh H. Dang

How to Interpret the Growing Phenomenon of Private Tutoring: Human Capital Deepening, Inequality Increasing, or Waste of Resources?

Private tutoring is now a major component of the education sector in many developing countries, yet education policy too seldom acknowledges and makes use of it. Various criticisms have been raised against private tutoring, most notably that it exacerbates social inequalities and may even fail to improve student outcomes. This paper surveys the literature for evidence on private tutoring-the extent of the tutoring phenomenon, the factors that explain its growth, and its cost-effectiveness in improving student academic performance. It also presents a framework for assessing the efficiency and equity effects of tutoring. It concludes that tutoring can raise the effectiveness of the education system under certain reasonable assumptions, even taking into account equity concerns, and it offers guidance for attacking corruption and other problems that diminish the contributions of the tutoring sector.

Vietnam: A Widening Poverty Gap for Ethnic Minorities

Vietnam has one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world in recent years. However, ethnic groups in this country may not equally share the benefit of this wealth increase. Using data from household surveys in Vietnam, this paper offers an analysis of the welfare outcomes between ethnic groups in poverty, education, labor market participation, labor earnings, child labor, health, nutrition and social protection. Ethnic minority groups fare significantly worse than ethnic majority groups for most indicators. This paper concludes with some policy recommendations to narrow the ethnic gap.

The decision to invest in child quality over quantity : household size and household investment in education in Vietnam

During Vietnams two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. This paper investigates whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact making a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children. The paper presents data on private tutoring -- a widespread education phenomenon in Vietnam -- as a new measure of household investment in childrens quality combining it with traditional measures of household education investments. To assess the quantity-quality tradeoff, the paper instruments for family size using the distance to the nearest family planning center. IV estimation results based on data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys (VHLSSs) and other sources show that families do indeed invest less in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings. This effect holds for several different indicators of educational investment and is robust to different definitions of family size, identification strategies, and model specifications that control for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. Finally, estimation results suggest that tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented household investments in education than traditional measures like enrolment, which are arguably less nuanced and less household-driven.

Was Vietnam's Economic Growth in the 1990s Pro-poor? An Analysis of Panel Data from Vietnam

International aid agencies and almost all economists agree that economic growth is necessary for reducing poverty, yet some economists question whether it is sufficient for poverty reduction. Vietnam enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1990s, but a modest increase in inequality during that decade raises the possibility that the poor in Vietnam benefited little from that growth. This article examines the extent to which Vietnam’s economic growth has been “pro-poor,” giving particular attention to two issues. The first is the appropriate comparison group. When comparing the poorest x% of the population at two points in time, should the poorest x% in the first time period be compared to the poorest x% in the second time period (some of whom were not the poorest x% in the first time period) or to the same people in the second time period (some of whom are no longer among the poorest x%)? The second is measurement error. Estimates of growth among the poorest x% of the population are likely to be biased if income or expenditure is measured with error. Household survey data show that Vietnam’s growth has been relatively equally shared across poor and nonpoor groups. Indeed, comparisons of the same people over time indicate that per capita expenditures of the poor increased much more rapidly than those of the nonpoor, although failure to correct for measurement error exaggerates this result.

Private tutoring in Vietnam : a review of current issues and its major correlates

Building on the earlier work, this paper provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam in several aspects, including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 where data are available. Several (micro-) correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household head education and residence area, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household size. In particular, the analysis focuses on the last three variables, which have received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.

Toward a new definition of shared prosperity: a dynamic perspective from three countries

This paper proposes a new measure of growth in shared prosperity, based on shifts in population shares of different income groups over time. This measure complements the definition of shared prosperity recently proposed by the World Bank in which income growth of the bottom 40 percent is examined. The new measure’s strengths arise from its close ties to countries’ national poverty lines and poverty measures, its focus on inclusion of the vulnerable population, and its identification of a population segment that is neither poor nor at significant risk of falling into poverty. The paper also offers a typology of scenarios for tracking shared prosperity under this measure. It provides illustrative examples using survey data from India, the United States, and Vietnam for the mid-to-late 2000s. Estimation results comparing the two approaches with measuring the evolution of shared prosperity are qualitatively consistent, and suggest that during this period, Vietnam enjoyed the greatest expansion in shared prosperity, followed by India and then the United States.

Incentives and teacher effort : further evidence from a developing country

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of whether students learn in school and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This paper examines how incentives, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate new measures of teacher effort including the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private tutoring classes outside of class hours. Estimation results indicate that higher teacher effort is associated with non-pecuniary incentives such as greater teacher autonomy over teaching materials, and monitoring mechanism such as the existence of an active parent-teacher association and ability of school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous OLS-probit model with school random effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and tutoring provision.

Updating Poverty Estimates at Frequent Intervals in the Absence of Consumption Data: Methods and Illustration with Reference to a Middle-Income Country

Obtaining consistent estimates on poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers. However, these objectives are not readily achieved in practice when household consumption data are neither frequently collected, nor constructed using consistent and transparent criteria. This paper develops a formal framework for survey-to-survey poverty imputation in an attempt to overcome these obstacles, and to elevate the discussion of these methods beyond the largely ad-hoc efforts in the existing literature. The framework introduced here imposes few restrictive assumptions, works with simple variance formulas, provides guidance on the selection of control variables for model building, and can be generally applied to imputation either from one survey to another survey with the same design, or to another survey with a different design. Empirical results analyzing the Household Expenditure and Income Survey and the Unemployment and Employment Survey in Jordan are quite encouraging, with imputation-based poverty estimates closely tracking the direct estimates of poverty.

School Access, Resources, and Learning Outcomes: Evidence from a Non-Formal School Program in Bangladesh

This study reports evidence from an unusual policy intervention- The Reaching Out of School Children (ROSC) project in Bangladesh where school grants and education allowances are offered to attract hard-to-reach children to schools comprised of a single teacher and a classroom. The operating unit cost of these schools is a fraction of that of formal primary schools. Panel data is used to investigate whether ROSC schools are effective in raising enrolment and learning outcomes. The findings suggest that there is a modest impact on school participation: ROSC schools increase enrolment probability between 9 and 18 percent for children in the two age cohorts 6 to 8 and 6 to 10. They perform as well as non-ROSC schools in terms of raising test scores, and even have positive impacts on academically stronger students. There is also strong evidence of positive externalities on non-ROSC schools in program areas. These results point to the effectiveness of a new model of non-formal primary schools that can be replicated in similar settings. This paper consists of following sections: section one gives introduction. The context for the country and the program description is provided in section two, and the data is described in section three. The impacts of the ROSC project on education outcomes as measured by student enrolment and test scores are discussed in section four and other program effects are considered in section five, with the empirical estimation frameworks being respectively detailed in each section. The relative efficiency of ROSC schools versus non-ROSC schools is discussed in section six and section seven gives conclusion.

Who remained in poverty, who moved up, and who fell down ? an investigation of poverty dynamics in Senegal in the late 2000s

Poverty estimates based on cross-section data provide static snapshots of poverty rates. Although a time series of cross-section data can offer some insights into poverty trends, it does not allow for an assessment of dynamics at the household level. Such a dynamic perspective on poverty generally calls for panel data and this kind of analysis can usefully inform poverty reduction policy, notably the design of social protection interventions. Absent actual panel data for Senegal, this paper applies new statistical methods to construct synthetic panel data from two rounds of cross-section household surveys in 2005 and 2011. These data are used to study poverty transitions. The results suggest that, in marked contrast to the picture obtained from cross-section data, there exists a great deal of mobility in and out of poverty during this period. More than half the population experiences changes in its poverty status and more than two-thirds of the extreme (food) poor move up one or two welfare categories. Factors such as rural residence, disability, exposure to some kind of natural disaster, and informality in the labor market are associated with a heightened risk of falling into poverty. Belonging to certain ethnicities and factors such as migration, working in the non-agriculture sector, and having access to social capital are associated with a lower risk of falling into poverty.