Abstract
Social investment in schooling in low-income countries has increased greatly in the 1990s and 2000s because of the robust associations among schooling and demographic, economic, and health outcomes. This analysis investigates whether targeted school-attendance stipend programs succeeded in reducing gender and socioeconomic inequalities in school attainment among a sample of the rural poor in Bangladesh. Multivariate analyses find that targeted stipend programs helped to reduce the gender attainment gap. Females had an increased probability of participating in stipend programs, and returns to stipend participation were significantly higher for females. However, stipend programs failed to reduce the relative achievement gap between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds: low socioeconomic status (SES) was associated with a decreased probability of stipend participation, and stipend-related schooling gains for lower-SES females were matched by comparable gains for higher–SES females. Meanwhile, there was no significant association between stipend participation and schooling attainment for males.
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Notes
A trial version of the FSP was launched by an NGO in 1982 on a small scale in six pilot areas. The program was scaled up to the national level with public financing in 1994.
Research suggests that mother’s and father’s resources may differentially affect children’s outcomes (Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003). I rerun all analyses using gender-disaggregated variables for mother’s and father’s education and wealth; however, I do not find significant differences in the predictive power of mother’s versus father’s resources for the outcomes of interest.
All descriptive percentages are approximate because of rounding.
The Female Secondary School Stipend Program was targeted exclusively to females. However, six male children in the sample reported receiving the Female Secondary School Stipend. This discrepancy could be due to measurement error or erroneous program targeting. I reran all analyses excluding these six respondents, and results were unchanged.
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Acknowledgments
Background support for this study was provided by the grant Team 1000+ Saving Brains: Economic Impact of Poverty-Related Risk Factors for Cognitive Development and Human Capital “0072-03” provided to the Grantee, the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania by Grand Challenges Canada. I am grateful to Jere Behrman for support and guidance throughout the development of the article. Pat Sharkey, Larry Wu, Florencia Torche, Paula England, Sara Duvisac, Abigail Weitzman, Monica Caudillo, Wahid Quabili, and Agnes Quisumbing provided helpful comments and assistance. I benefited from comments from participants of the American Sociological Association annual meeting, Population Association of America annual meeting, Sociology of Development annual meeting, NYU inequality workshop, and NYU graduate student conference.
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Behrman, J.A. Do Targeted Stipend Programs Reduce Gender and Socioeconomic Inequalities in Schooling Attainment? Insights From Rural Bangladesh. Demography 52, 1917–1927 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0435-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-015-0435-9