In his article on "The Consequences of Rapid Population Growth on Human Resource Development: The Case of Education", Allen Kelley takes a close look at education in developing countries as a function of human capital. His central inquiries address the relationships between human capital and physical capital, and what combination of the two is optimal for the constant adaptation to population growth. He explores further the implications of that population growth on the levels of education attained by children of large families in comparison to children of small family size.
In the beginning of the article, Kelley sums the inherent contrast between
human capital and other forms of investment, and the problems this poses
for developing countries regarding education specifically. Investing in
human capital does not bring short-term reward. Therefore, the diversion
of economic growth from technological assets to assets of human capital
often receives adverse opposition because of the lower rates of return.
He emphasizes the difficulty most developing countries have in just maintaining
their standard levels of education. Increasing those levels, says Kelley,
"is a daunting task for third world countries" (p. 68).
But as populations in these countries grow, finances need to be managed
somehow to facilitate the increasing number of students. How, exactly, is
not clear. Due to the aforementioned opposition to productive growth related
expenditures being rechannelled into sectors of minimal short run returns,
private and public funds will not be concentrated exclusively on education.
The only ways education would receive government spending is through greater
efficiency in the education sector itself, or from resource diversions from
sectors with lesser impact on economic growth. Regarding financing within
the household of an additional child's education, parents are faced with
equal dilemmas of their own scale. There must either be a diversion of expenditures
from low-priority consumption or an increase in household income through
more labor investment; neither a desirable action for a relatively poor
parent in a developing country. But perhaps the parent's decision-making
process considers the birthing and educating of another child an investment
in the development of the economies of the domestic household and the country
itself. This leads to Kelley's analysis of the utility of education as human
capital in light of the impending investment conditions of economic development
and population growth.
Specifically, Kelley poses the following three questions. Have population
pressures significantly constrained the pace of human capital growth in
education? Have these expenditures "crowded out" other areas of
investment? Have large families deterred schooling enrollments and attainment;
and how have families underwritten the costs of schooling? He acknowledges
the negative relationship between larger family size and child investment
through education, but proposes that there exists positive elements of the
relationship as well. Further, that there exists a tradeoff in the education
sector's response to population growth- from quality to quantity- that has
its potential benefits as well.
In developing countries, the common response to the increasing student population
has been a considerable "widening" of educational opportunities.
By this Kelley means more enrollments have been provided to a larger body
of students. This has been done at the expense of "deepening"
the education a pupil of that student body receives. Diverting funds from
deepening in this case means less expenditures or teachers per pupil. One
would assume the net impacts of such a tradeoff would be negative, but Kelley
suggests that such an impact is much more uncertain. There are implications
of population growth at play that can be driving forces in development.
Households, firms, and government bodies often find ways to respond to population
growth that expand resources, including reallocations that improve efficiency
of resource use. Therefore, reallocating the educational resources to accommodate
the larger student body sizes may reduce the quality of education received
by each pupil in the short run, but in the long run the amount of human
capital in the country has exponentially increased. Though the capacity
of each pupil's education may be slightly diluted after graduation, the
increased number of educated, able entrants into the skilled work force
will be greater than ever, and the long run benefits could well exceed any
other expenditure diversion plan that may have been devised. According to
Kelley, "If investments in human capital have higher returns than investments
in physical capital, or if returns are lower but there are constraints on
capital markets that deter the channeling of funds to physical capital,
then it is theoretically possible that an expansion of the "investment
vehicle" (children) associated with human capital investments can contribute
to the level and productivity of overall growth-enhancing investment"
(p. 71).
The analyses made by Kelley in his article are based on his findings from
over thirty-six studies of household data in twenty developing countries.
Another similar analysis- formed by John Knodel, Truong Si Anh, David Lam,
and Jed Friedman- was published based on data from the 1994 Inter-Censal
Demographic Survey in Vietnam. Obviously these studies have been focused
on developing countries because of the assumed mean household incomes that
relative to the higher fertility rates of their demographic region are proportionately
low. Just as done by Kelley, the article begins by acknowledging the negative
relationship between population growth and education, but continues in pointing
out that arguments have been made as to why a positive relationship also
exists. For Knodel et al., they show that though a recurring negative trend
can be seen in this study of children of large families, the percent decline
present is by no means linear with the percent increase of additional children.
Therefore in a conclusion similar to that of Kelley's analysis, the debits
of the observable negative trends between large family size and education
are small enough in proportion to the percent increases of students per
family that there are credits in the long run that will offset those negative
trends.
Before turning to the data it is important to address the condition established
at the beginning of the article that states that the effect of family size
should be considered in light of the fact that costs of education are funded
by not only the nuclear family, but by extended kinships and the state as
well. This is often overlooked, and such a mistake increases human error
within general assumptions on parental decision making in developing countries.
In the Vietnamese study, the authors found that controlling for such variables
as the region the child was raised in, whether or not the parents were educated,
and household wealth greatly reduced the strength of the correlation between
family size and school attendance. However, even the more significant correlation
of the unadjusted probabilities is not strong enough to suggest that current
fertility rates are hazardous enough to both child investment and economic
development that a curbing policy is necessary. One statistic that first
caught my attention is the odds ratio of Vietnamese students that finished
upper secondary school (ages 19-24). For a student in upper secondary school
from a family of one child, their odds ratio of finishing is 1.00. For a
student from a family of five children, their odds ratio of finishing is
.808, only twenty percent less! Twenty percent is a significant number,
but realize that the family size they came from is four hundred percent
larger. From this consideration we may surmise that the incremental decrease
of investment on that fifth child is only minimally significant.
The graph in Figure 1 plots the percent of children in school (ages 10-12)
on the y-axis and the family size on the x-axis, and the light bars show
the amount of children in school as adjusted to the aforementioned control
variables. Clearly the negative relationship is visible, and
the percent decline of children attending school is significant according
to unadjusted data (20 %). However, even here we see a percent decline that
is much less than the percent increase in family size. The adjusted data,
which can be referred to as a more thorough understanding of the situation
in Vietnam, further highlights the minimal significance of the negative
relationship between population growth and education investment. In this
case, there appears to be only a 10% decrease in attendance by children
of families five and six times as large as the families in the top percentile
of attendance. The study provides numerous graphs referring to all different
age levels and demographic variables, and each example demonstrates the
same trend.
1. Kelley, Allen C. "The Consequences of Rapid Population Growth on
Human Resource Development: The Case of Education", in The Impact of
Population Growth on Well-Being in Developing Countries, Dennis A. Ahlburg,
Allen C. Kelley and Karen Oppenheim Mason (editors), Springer Verlag, New
York, 1996, pp. 67-138.
2. Truong, Si Anh; Knodel, John; Lam, David; Friedman, Jan. "Family
Size and Children's Education in Vietnam", Demography, Vol. 35, No.
1, Feb. 1998, pp. 57-70.