How Do Positive and Negative Shocks to Education System Jointly Affect Individual Outcomes? The Case of Education Reforms in Vietnam

Hanbo Wu, New York University Abu Dhabi

Research on education reforms focuses chiefly on positive shocks that intend to equalize educational opportunity, while negative shocks that impede access to education have rarely been investigated. In this article, I draw on a unique case—Vietnam, where both a universal primary education reform (a positive shock) and an introduction of tuition fee for secondary education (a negative shock) took place almost at the same time—to assess how the positive and negative shocks jointly affect individuals. I find that the negative shock decreased individual years of schooling, while the positive shock increased it. In general, the beneficial impact of the positive shock runs over the adverse impact of the negative shock, resulting in an overall improvement in educational attainment for Vietnamese people who were exposed to both reforms. The favorable joint effect on schooling is more pronounced for socioeconomically disadvantaged rural residents, women, and ethnic minorities. Advantaged urban residents, by contrast, attained less schooling if they were exposed to both reforms, because for them the influence of the negative shock exceeds that of the positive shock. Educational assortative mating, intergenerational persistence of education, as well as labor market, demographic, and health outcomes are also examined.

Keywords: Human Capital, Education, and Work, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Population Policies, Population and Development

See paper.