The impacts of parental socioeconomic status, pre-primary schooling, and productive safety nets on young children in Ethiopia

Sahilea, Esubalew Asmare

The impacts of parental socioeconomic status, pre-primary schooling, and productive safety nets on young children in Ethiopia

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Economics

Faculty

Faculty of Commerce

Abstract

The thesis examines three causal questions regarding child development. Chapter 2 examines the dynamics of parental socioeconomic status for child outcomes. The key question is what are the causal effects (impacts) of parental socio-economic status. This question has not been adequately addressed in the existing literature. The chapter also explores whether parental qualities and the home environment mediates developmental gaps in child nutrition, cognition, emotion, and subjective well-being. The main finding is that family socio-economic status is an important cause of child developmental outcomes, with a stronger effect on child anthropometric measures, followed by cognitive achievement, subjective well-being, and emotional development outcomes. The self-productivity estimates reveal strong evidence of the persistence of child developmental outcomes over time. Within a domain of child development, cross-productivity is also observed, such that the current value of an outcome is highly determined by the current value of another outcome within a domain of development rather than its own lagged value. The findings of the mediation analysis demonstrate the importance of parental material investment (particularly cognitive stimulating materials) and a lower level of family stress in mediating the effect of SES on child cognitive and socioemotional outcomes, respectively Chapter 3 evaluates the impacts of pre-primary school enrollment. The focus in this chapter is on child social skills and networking, emotional development, and cognitive achievement. The key question we seek to answer is what are the impacts of preschool enrollment for child socioemotional and cognitive outcomes? We employ propensity score matching to find “statistical twins” for preschool children from non-preschool children based on observable characteristics. The main findings are that the programme has longer-term impacts on child cognition, and social skills and networking. No significant effects are detected for emotional development, but preschool duration and quality do matter. Chapter 4 then studies the impacts of the household-level social security programme. Our key question is what are the impacts on child wellbeing and cognition for participating households? We find that the PSNP increases recipient children's language skills, with a large effect for children from poor households. Our transmission analysis reveals that better nutrition and increased spending on children's books and stationery are potential pathways through which PSNP improves child language skills.