Risk and schooling decisions in rural Madagascar: A panel data-analysis

Most households in rural Madagascar are engaged in agriculture and derive a large share of their income from the production of food or cash crops and from animal husbandry. However, agricultural yields can be extremely volatile due to weather conditions, pests, insects, rodents and other calamities....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of African economies 2008-03, Vol.17 (2), p.207-238
Main Authors: Gubert, Flore, Robilliard, Anne-Sophie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural income
Agriculture
Animal husbandry
Bildungssystem
Bildungsverhalten
Breeding of animals
Child labor
Child labour
Children & youth
D91
Datasets
Developing countries
Economic analysis
Economic fluctuations
Education
Employment
Families & family life
Family income
Food
Gender
Girls
Household economics
Households
Human capital
Hypotheses
I21
Income maintenance
J24
Landbevölkerung
LDCs
Ländlicher Raum
Madagascar
Madagaskar
O55
Parents & parenting
Poverty
Rain
Regression analysis
Resource allocation
Rural areas
School attendance
School dropouts
Securities markets
Security management
Studies
Volatility
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Summary:Most households in rural Madagascar are engaged in agriculture and derive a large share of their income from the production of food or cash crops and from animal husbandry. However, agricultural yields can be extremely volatile due to weather conditions, pests, insects, rodents and other calamities. As a result, households record large fluctuations in their incomes that must be dealt with. Since the usual consumption-smoothing market mechanisms are quite limited in the Malagasy context, households need to rely on non-market mechanisms or to adopt multi-faceted strategies to cope with risk. In this paper, we examine the possibility that parents obtain informal income insurance by letting their children work. We test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between household income shocks and human capital investment in children. In particular, we investigate whether children's propensity to join school and to drop out of school responds to transient shocks. We also investigate issues such as gender and intrahousehold resource allocation.
ISSN:0963-8024
1464-3723
DOI:10.1093/jae/ejm010