| 1. Title: School expenditures and enrollments, 1960-1980: the effects of income, prices and population growth. Author: Schultz TP Source: [Unpublished] 1985. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Boston, Massachusetts, March 28-30, 1985. 91 p. Abstract: 1 reason it is difficult to measure the relationship between relative cohort size and educational inputs and outputs is because the size of the school-aged cohort is primarily a lagged measure of period fertility rates. The fertility of parents is closely related to what parents privately invest in the schooling of each of their children, and this tradeoff of quantity and quality has attracted the attention of many social scientists. The observation that fertility and schooling are inversely related does not imply "one" causes the other. It is important that the inverse correlation between fertility and child schooling must not be mistaken for evidence confirming the effect of relative cohort size on public educational expenditures or enrollment. The analytical problem is how to distinguish between 2 possible parallel associations: the first at the level of family choice between increases in parent investments in the schooling of their children and declines in their fertility; and second at the aggregate level between the relative size of a school-aged cohort and the resultant squeeze on available school inputs and outputs per child. The strategy adopted here for separating these 2 relationships is to estimate the partial correlation between relative school-age cohort size and indicators of school expenditures and outputs, holding constant for current total fertility rates. This paper reviews world trends in school enrollments and central government expenditures on education and identifies several issues for further study; models the determinants of demand for public schooling to specify how to proceed with the empirical analysis; and reports the empirical findings of an analysis of data from about 90 countries in the last 3 decades. A final section uses these results to predict the recent trends over time. The empirical association between public school expenditures and enrollments, on the 1 hand, and real incomes per adult and the relative price of teachers, on the other, confirms the view that income and price variables contribute to determining the equilibrium level of expenditures on schooling within a country. The working hypothesis that private demands for educational services explain public expenditures is not rejected. Holding constant for these dominant income and price constraints on the public educational system, urbanization was found to be associated with lower expenditures per school-aged child, and this reduction in outlays on education in more urbanized countries was associated with a lower price of teachers relative to other goods. The proportion of the population of school age was associated with lower levels of public expenditure per child. Thus, rapid population growth which tends to increase the youthfulness of the population plays an indirect role in squeezing public resources allocated to the school system. Language: English Keywords: TOTAL FERTILITY RATE | FERTILITY RATE | FERTILITY MEASUREMENTS | MEASUREMENT | EDUCATION | DECISION MAKING | BEHAVIOR | INCOME | SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS | SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS | MACROECONOMIC FACTORS | POPULATION GROWTH | POPULATION DYNAMICS | POPULATION | STATISTICAL STUDIES | DATA ANALYSIS | RESEARCH METHODOLOGY | Birth Rate | Fertility | Demographic Factors | Economic Factors | Studies Document Number: 031137 |
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