Sharon Ghuman, Jere R. Behrman, Judith B. Borja, Socorro Gultiano, Elizabeth M. King
Human capital investments in the first few years of life have increasingly been emphasized to be important determinants of cognitive development, school performance, productivity, income, and health and nutritional status over the life course. Accumulated evidence supports strong associations between nutritional status and cognitive and psychosocial skills measured at young ages and schooling attainment, earnings, employment, and health and nutrition outcomes in later life. Numerous studies indicate significant positive associations of family background with child development. We direct this study toward important questions regarding the interpretation of the associations between family background and early childhood development (ECD) that have received limited attention in the empirical literature. The first two questions relate to whether correlates of ECD including family background are proxying for other variables in the usual estimates. The second two questions relate to whether there are interactions between family background and other variables or among the family background variables. In this article, we examine the above questions using rich new data collected from the Philippines that includes indicators of (1) ECD for 3,556 Filipino preschool children ages 0-36 months (cognitive, social, and motor development; anthropometrics; hemoglobin measurements; occurrence of worms); (2) family background (schooling and anthropometrics both for mothers and fathers, as well as household expenditures, asset ownership, and housing quality); and (3) local health and ECD-related service providers (presence of various facilities). In the next section, we describe the survey data used in our analysis and follow with a detailed description of our measures of ECD, family background, and health services. We then present our estimates for (1) associations between ECD and observed family background characteristics in our simplest specification, (2) how the estimated associations of child development with family background change with the inclusion of health and other ECD-related services and community fixed effects, (3) the importance of interactions between family background and health and other ECD-related services for ECD, and (4) the presence of interactions between measures of family background in their relationship to ECD. We end with a summary of our results and conclusions. © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, United States; University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines; World Bank, Washington, DC, United States
