Children are typically more likely to go to school if their parents are educated. They also tend to perform better in school and in some cases may earn higher incomes in adulthood. For example, a study of Kenya and Tanzania compared the probability of manufacturing workers having completed lower secondary schooling as a function of the education of their parents. In Kenya those entering school around 1960 were predicted to have a 21% chance of completing lower secondary if both their parents were uneducated and an 83% chance if one of their parent had at least secondary education and the other at least primary education. The figures were similar Tanzania. Since most secondary schools at that time were state schools, where access was rationed by performance in the primary-leaving examination, these figures also suggest large differentials in academic performance by parental education. More recent research drawing upon data from Kenya in 1993, also found a large differential in performance on the primary-leaving examination - around half of which was explained by the different local neighbourhoods and primary schools which children from different educational backgrounds attended (Appleton, 1995b).
These results suggest that educating one generation will have favourable effects both on the cognitive skills and the health of the next. They also imply that there may be a “ratchet effect” to educational expansions: parents may be reluctant to see their children obtaining less education than they received.
Investments in health also have long-term dynamic intergenerational effects, which are partly biological.
Consequently, a mother’s nutrition affects the health not only of her children, but of her daughter’s children. Compared to much physical capital, human capital is long-lived and more irreversible: if people are not given adequate nutrition, health care and education in childhood, this is will have consequences that cannot be remedied in adulthood. For these reasons, investments in human capital cannot be put off until economic conditions are better.
Human Capital and Economic Development Simon Appleton and Francis Teal
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