Suchergebnisse

This paper presents evidence on how children's educational outcomes are affected by family, social and economic backgrounds in a developing economy by exploiting data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2011. In a developing country like Bangladesh, a child's educational outcome is not only dependent on government policies but also on the child's social and economic background. In this paper an attempt has been made to answer the question — how household conditions affect the educational attainments of children. To answer this question an examination of proximate factors associated with school dropouts has been conducted by developing Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and probit estimations to see if the models can explain the Bangladesh DHS data well. Any differential effects of the gender of the household head or across regions have been taken care of to arrive at the results. A set of independent variables has been identified representing the household status and family conditions. For the OLS model, the dependent variable chosen is the percentage of school dropouts from a particular household. For the Probit model, a dichotomous variable indicating whether the household has any number of school dropouts or not was calculated. The results showed that children from poor families with less educated parents have overall high dropout rates with a lasting effect on educational outcomes. Father's education plays a significant role in reducing the dropout rates, whereas the mother's education has negligible effect. It is also noted that families with more than 3 children and household members greater than 5 also have fewer number of children who are going to school. The place of residence, access to electricity and school transportation reduces the dropout rates. Also, the results for the probit model virtually mirror the OLS results. The OLS and probit do not diverge in sign or significance for most other variables either such as urban-rural location and father's education. This paper is a valuable contribution for assessing the policies taken by the Government of Bangladesh because Bangladesh's school dropout rate has increased over the last few years. This paper is the first of its kind as it uses a different methodology to assess the effect of household conditions on children's educational outcomes.

Poverty is multi-dimensional in nature and depends on interactions of various socio-economic factors. Several demographic and health factors can shape up the economic status of a household, and theory suggests that the ability of a household to earn a given level of income can depend on the characteristics internal to the household. While most studies done on poverty measurements rely on the income, expenditure and consumption data, this study has used data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The main objective of this paper is to identify the factors that have relative effect on poverty of the household. The principal component analysis was used to create an asset index which gave the Social Economic Status (SES) of each household. The variables were tested as a univariate model to see the effect on SES. Finally, a logistic regression was estimated based on this data with the SES (that is poor and non-poor) as the dependent variable and a set of demographic variables as the explanatory variables. The results presented in this paper suggest that the DHS data can be used to determine the correlates of poverty. The results also suggest that demographic and household data can describe poverty. The probability of a household being poor depends on the ownership of assets and other household data. A closer look was then taken to identify whether the results were driven by rural or urban property. The further analyses suggest that rural poverty is significantly affected by the demographic and household characteristics. The results were mostly driven by rural poverty rather than urban poverty. The paper has some policy values, as it suggests that rural people more suffer from the plight of poverty than do the urban people. Hence, the government needs to focus on improving the standard of living in rural areas of Bangladesh.