Working Paper

2015-05-28

University of Cape Town

Little credible evidence exists on the effect of material resources on school quality in developing countries. This paper studies the impact of non-personnel funding on educational outcomes exploiting the peculiar way in which these resources are allocated in South Africa. Government funding follows quintiles constructed on the basis of school poverty scores. This creates discrete jumps in the allocation of funding and we use a regression discontinuity approach to analyze its effects on school outcomes at the end of high school. Our results show a small but positive effect of resources on student throughput during the last years of high school, and on the number of students writing the matriculation exam. However, additional resources do not translate into a higher number of successful exams, leading to an overall negative effect on pass rates. We suggest that these findings may have to do with schools reacting to the per-pupil nature of funding.

Miquel Pellicer, GIGA, Hamburg and SALDRU Patrizio Piraino, University of Cape Town

We acknowledge funding from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme through the NOPOOR project: "Enhancing knowledge for renewed policies against poverty". We would like to thank participants at the SALDRU seminar at the University of Cape Town, and at the RP3 GIGA seminar for useful comments. We are grateful to Rob Garlick for detailed and very useful feedback on an earlier draft. All errors are ours.