1. The Impacts of Natural Disasters on Educational Attainment.
Lois Onigbinde
University of San Francisco, Department of Economics.
The paper combines the following secondary data for 85 countries from 1960 to 1990;
Natural disasters: international disasters database, emergency events database (EM-DAT) maintained by Centre for the Research of the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED)
Educational attainment, parent education, teacher-to-student ratio: barro-lee educational attainment data set
Other school variables like total population and GDP (proxy for parents’ income): world bank open databank
Natural disasters data is collapsed into a five-year period to match the 5-year average educational attainment data for a panel dataset
Discussion
Motivation
Data
42% of children in developing countries are projected to drop out of school before finishing school (Sustainable Development Goals, 2016 ).
Slow rise of Humanitarian budget allocation to education: this increased from 2% to 2.7% between 2016 to 3% ($700 million) in 2017 (Global Partnership for Education).
More education, more growth: GDP increases by 0.37% for every additional year of schooling leading to a 1% improved learning outcomes (UNDP report, 2005).
The Children suffer, too: One in six children (aged 3-15) are directly affected by disasters and girls are 2.5 times more likely to be out of school in these affected countries (Education Cannot Wait Fund, 2017).
From the 124 million children who are out of school, 1 in 3 are in countries affected by disasters (Education Cannot Wait Fund, 2017).
Result show that one percentage increase in the intensity of deaths causes a decline in secondary school attainment by 12.8%, significant at 5% level of significance. The intensity of damages shows a negative and not significant association with secondary school attainment.
Map generated from the dataset of the study by author using Tableau.
The broad question to be addressed is;
Do natural disasters (damages and deaths) per capita impact educational attainment at the secondary level?
Sub-questions:
Do these effects differ by country income and by disaster type?
Do these measures have effects on secondary school repetition rates?
How do these results affect coping strategies and risk-management policies?
Empirical Strategy and Results
Research Question
The Fixed Effects model be used under the identifying assumption that there are time-invariant unobservable factors that are unique to factors on both sides of the equation. This specification follows the work of Barro-Lee (1993) and Escaleras and Register (2011).
𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑦_𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑖𝑡 = 𝛼 𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽 1 𝜃 𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽 2 𝜃 𝑖𝑡−1 + 𝛽 3 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡_𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽 4 𝑝𝑢𝑝𝑖𝑙_𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟_𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜 𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽 5 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙_𝑔𝑜𝑣𝑡_𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒_𝑝𝑒𝑟_𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑖𝑡 + 𝛽 6 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡_𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑡 +𝜆 𝑖 + 𝜆 𝑡 + 𝜀 𝑖𝑡
𝜃 𝑖𝑡 represents the deaths per capita (total deaths /total population) and damages (total damages/total population).
𝜃 𝑖𝑡−1 represents the lagged estimates of the natural disaster predictor estimates.
𝜆 𝑡 represents Year fixed effects.
𝜆 𝑖 represents Country fixed effects.
Standard errors are clustered at country-level.
Contribution
To answer these questions, I collapse natural disasters data into the available five-year period education data.
This panel includes 85 countries from 1960 to 1990.
I investigate the effects of natural disasters from the previous 5-year period on the current 5-year period of secondary school attainment.
Particularly, I use Natural Disasters data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for the Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters and Education data from the Barro-Lee study (1993, 2001 and 2010) and the World Bank Databank.
VARIABLES
Secondary
Attainment
Logged_damages_per_capita
-0.011
-0.024
(0.030)
(0.029)
Logged _l1_damages_per_capita
0.011
-0.017
(0.033)
Logged_deaths_per_capita
-0.103**
-0.128**
(0.050)
(0.060)
Logged_l1_deaths_per_capita
0.035
-0.012
(0.071)
(0.063)
ln_parents_income (GDPpc)
0.164
-0.124
(1.256)
(1.257)
Teacher-pupil at secondary level
0.023
0.014
0.026
0.018
(0.034)
(0.042)
(0.041)
Real government current education educational expenditure per pupil at secondary
0.022
0.020
(0.043)
% of secondary school attained in the total 25+ pop (Parents’ education)
0.896***
0.915***
0.900***
0.926***
(0.058)
(0.052)
(0.059)
Constant
4.261**
2.200
3.225
3.096
(1.664)
(10.015)
(2.047)
(9.888)
Observations
312
293
R-squared
0.845
0.864
0.847
0.866
Number of Country 76 72
Map generated from the dataset of the study by author using Tableau.
Geophysical: Earthquake, Mass movement (dry), Volcanic activity
Hydro-meteorological: Storms, Floods, Landslides
Climatological: Droughts, wildfires.
From about 40 events worldwide to 296 events and from $1.26 billion in the 1960s to about $50 billion in the 90s.
218 million people were affected by natural disasters on average per annum during this 20-year period.
3,062 (43%) floods between 1995 and 2015.
Storms and Earthquakes at 28% and 8% (2,018 and 562 events) respectively.
Landslide and Droughts are at 5%, that is 387 and 334 events.
Wildfire and Volcanic activity are 4% and 2% (251 and 111 events) of total recorded natural disasters between 1995 and 2015 (World economic Forum, 2016; CRED).
The Disasters
References
Barro, Robert J, and Jong-Wha Lee. "International Comparisons Of Educational Attainment". Journal Of Monetary Economics, vol 32, no. 3, 1993, pp  Elsevier BV, doi: / (93)
Escaleras, M., and C. A. Register. "Natural Disasters And Foreign Direct Investment". Land Economics, vol 87, no. 2, 2011, pp  University Of Wisconsin Press, doi: /le
EFA Global Monitoring Report: Chapter 2. UNDP, 2005.