Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/142355 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 9916
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Increasing enrollment in primary education has been at the center of international education policy for well over a decade. In developing parts of the world, significant increases in primary enrollment are often generated by large national level programs, which can simultaneously promote overcrowding and reductions in education quality. However, to analyze the trade-off between increased enrollment and potential reductions in quality one must first identify and evaluate the impact of the national reform on schooling. This paper provides a method with which these types of reforms can be identified in developing settings using both temporal and geographic variation, and readily available data. The method is applied to an early 1990s reform in Ethiopia based around the release of the Education and Training Policy, which removed schooling fees from grades one to ten. The model estimates that the reform led to an increase in schooling of at least 1.2 years, and provides initial evidence that the increased enrollment in Ethiopia outweighed any cost due to reductions in quality.
Subjects: 
free primary education
Ethiopia
schooling
JEL: 
I25
I28
O55
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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