Showing papers by "Deon Filmer published in 2017"

World Development Report 2018 : Learning to Realize Education's Promise

Abstract: Korea understood that education was the best way to pull itself out of economic misery, so it focused on overhauling schools and committed itself to educating every child, and educating them well. Coupled with smart, innovative government policies and a vibrant private sector, the focus on education paid off. Today, not only has Korea achieved universal literacy, but its students also perform at the highest levels in international learning assessments. It’s a high-income country and a model of successful economic development. Korea is a particularly striking example, but we can see the salutary effects of education in many countries. Delivered well, education, and the human capital it creates, has many benefits for economies, and for societies. For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, and health. It raises pride and opens new horizons. For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, reduces poverty, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion. In short, education powerfully advances the World Bank Group’s twin strategic goals: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Given that today’s students will be tomorrow’s citizens, leaders, workers, and parents, a good education is an investment with enduring benefits. But providing education is not enough. What is important, and what generates a real return on investment, is learning and acquiring skills. This is what truly builds human capital. As this year’s, World Development Report documents, in many countries and communities learning isn’t happening. Schooling without learning is a terrible waste of precious resources and of human potential. Worse, it is an injustice. Without learning, students will be locked into lives of poverty and exclusion, and the children whom societies fail the most are those most in need of a good education to succeed in life. Learning conditions are almost always much worse for the disadvantaged, and so are learning outcomes. Moreover, far too many children still aren’t even attending school. This is a moral and economic crisis that must be addressed immediately. This year’s Report provides a path to address this economic and moral failure. The detailed analysis in this Report shows that these problems are driven not only by service delivery failings in schools but also by deeper systemic problems. The human capital lost because of these shortcomings threatens development and jeopardizes the future of peopleand their societies. At the same time, rapid technological change raises the stakes: to compete in the economy of the future, workers need strong basic skills and foundations for adaptability, creativity, and lifelong learning.

Enrollment without Learning: Teacher Effort, Knowledge, and Skill in Primary Schools in Africa

Abstract: School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Teacher quality is a key determinant of student learning, but not much is known about teacher quality in low-income countries. This paper discusses an ongoing research program intended to help fill this void. We use data collected through direct observations, unannounced visits, and tests from primary schools in seven sub-Saharan African countries to answer three questions: How much do teachers teach? What do teachers know? How well do teachers teach?

What do teachers know and do ? does it matter ? evidence from primary schools in Africa

Abstract: School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills—the so-called "learning crisis." This paper uses data from nationally representative surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, representing close to 40 percent of the region's total population, to investigate possible answers to this policy failure by quantifying teacher effort, knowledge, and skills. Averaging across countries, the paper finds that students receive two hours and fifty minutes of teaching per day—or just over half the scheduled time. In addition, large shares of teachers do not master the curricula of the students they are teaching; basic pedagogical knowledge is low; and the use of good teaching practices is rare. Exploiting within-student, within-teacher variation, the analysis finds significant and large positive effects of teacher content and pedagogical knowledge on student achievement. These findings point to an urgent need for improvements in education service delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also provide a lens through which the growing experimental and quasi-experimental literature on education in low-income countries can be interpreted and understood, and point to important gaps in knowledge, with implications for future research and policy design.

From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds: Turning Sub-Saharan Africa's Natural Resource Wealth into Human Capital

Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa's natural resource-rich countries have poor human development. Children in these countries are more likely to die before their first birthday, more likely to be stunted, and less likely to attend school than children in other countries with similar income. Despite the current price downturn, extractives will remain an important part of Sub-Saharan Africa's growth story—using resource rents wisely remains a long term challenge.Governments must choose how to allocate resource rents between spending, investing in human or physical capital, or investing in global financial assets. The return to investing in physical and human capital will be high in countries where the capital stock is low. Moreover, higher levels of human capital make investments in physical capital more productive, which suggests that the optimal portfolio will involve investing in both. Human capital should be prioritized in many of Sub-Saharan Africa’s resource-rich countries because of the low starting point. Investing effectively in human capital is hard because it involves delivering services, which means coordinating a large number of actors and activities. Three dimensions of governance are key: institutions, incentives and information. Decentralization and leveraging the private sector are entry points to reforming institutional structures. Revenues from natural resources can fund financial incentives to strengthen performance or demand. Producing information, making it available, and increasing social accountability helps citizens understand their rights and hold governments and providers accountable. Improving the quality of education and health services is central to improving human capital. Two additional areas are promising. First, early child development—mother and newborn health, and early child nutrition, care, and education—improves outcomes in childhood and later on. Second, cash transfers—either conditional or unconditional—reduce poverty, increase household investments in child education, nutrition, and health, and increase the investment in productive assets which foster further income generation.

Own and Sibling Effects of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs: Theory and Evidence from Cambodia1

Abstract: Conditional cash transfers (CCT) have been adopted in many countries over the last two decades. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. In particular, relatively little is known about the effects of these programs on intra-household allocation decisions. This chapter uses evidence from a program in Cambodia, where eligibility varied substantially among siblings in the same household, to illustrate these effects. A simple model of schooling decisions highlights three different effects of a child-specific CCT: an income effect, a substitution effect, and a displacement effect. The model predicts that such a CCT should unambiguously increase enrollment for eligible children, but have an ambiguous effect on ineligible siblings. The ambiguity arises from the interaction of a positive income effect with a negative displacement effect. These predictions are shown to be consistent with evidence from Cambodia, where the CESSP Scholarship Program (CSP) makes modest transfers, conditional on school enrollment for children of middle-school age. Scholarship recipients were more than 20 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school, and 10 percentage points less likely to work for pay. However, the school enrollment and work of ineligible siblings was largely unaffected by the program. A possible fourth effect, operating through non-pecuniary spillovers of the intervention among siblings, remains largely outside the scope of the analysis, although there is some tentative evidence to suggest that it might also be at work.

Preschool and Parental Response in a Second Best World: Evidence from a School Construction Experiment

Abstract: :Interventions targeting early childhood hold promise for reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Results from a randomized evaluation of a preschool construction program in Cambodia suggest caution. Overall impacts on early childhood outcomes are small and insignificant. Impacts on cognition are negative for the cohort with highest program exposure, with the largest negative effects among children of poorer and less educated parents. The results are explained by substitution from primary to preschool and differences in demand responses to preschools between more and less educated parents. Context, program specifics, and behavioral responses can hence lead to perverse effects of well-intentioned interventions.

Key Investments to Build the Foundations of Human Capital

Abstract: The foundations of human capital are set early in life, with long-lasting effects in adulthood and in the next generation. Investing early in health, nutrition, early childhood development, and basic education helps to set those foundations and thus yields high returns. Early investments are subject to fewer efficiency tradeoffs, and the cognitive and psychosocial skills acquired in early life enable further strong health, learning, and full participation in society at a lower cost. Poverty and exposure to conflict are major risks in early life through the deprivations and stress they cause to children and adults. Cash transfers can sustain household consumption in the short run and the uptake of human development services, which may improve household welfare, in the long run. While some interventions show promising results at the pilot stage, scaling them up requires qualitative shifts, stronger coordination, and innovative delivery systems, entailing new partnerships between levels of government and with nonstate actors. The Foundations of Human Capital The New Evidence on Early Development The period between the first few days of pregnancy and two years of life (the first 1,000 days) is intense for both physical and cognitive development. Children are expected to grow, on average, 50 centimeters in utero, 24 centimeters in their first year of life, and 12 centimeters in their second year, after which growth slows down until adolescence. Language, vision, and hearing start forming in the womb, and development peaks in the first two years. Some capabilities linked to social functioning, such as habitual responses and emotional control, are also in peak development in those 1,000 days (figure 4.1). During this period, children need good nutrition and become more sensitive to infections and biological programming.1 At that time, they depend totally on others for nutrition, care, and 144 Key Investments to Build the Foundations of Human Capital From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 social interactions. For this reason, the environment that their caregivers provide is a key factor in their development. During this period, malnutrition has multiple apparent and insidious consequences: it affects growth, morbidity, intelligence quotient (IQ)–type intelligence, and mortality.2 Undernutrition translates into small-for-gestational-age, stunting (inadequate length or height-for-age, a symptom of chronic undernutrition), and wasting (inadequate weight-for-height, a symptom of acute undernutrition). Inadequate growth—the visible symptom—hides invisible symptoms, which include impaired brain development and immune system. Undernutrition can affect the hard-wiring of the brain, through malfunctions in the coating of the nerves (myelination) and the formation of connections between neural cells (synapses) (Yusuf 1992). Micronutrient deficiencies, linked to the quality of children’s diet, may affect development in other silent ways. Vitamin A deficiency can cause night blindness and is a risk factor for increased severity of infections, which leads to increased mortality. Vitamin B12 deficiency can cause involuntary muscle movements, apathy, and cerebral atrophy. Iron deficiency is associated with fetal and child growth failure, lower cognitive development in children (Georgieff 2007; Nyaradi and others 2013), lower physical activity and productivity in adults, and increased maternal mortality. Zinc deficiency is associated with stunting and higher incidences of diarrhea and pneumonia. Iodine deficiency affects cognitive development and reduces IQ. Joint effects of fetal growth restriction, suboptimum breastfeeding, stunting, wasting, and deficiencies Figure 4.1 Early Brain Development Sets the Basis for Many Skills High Preschool years Sensitive periods in early brain development

Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries

Abstract: Natural resource wealth has helped to drive up national income in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Although modestly lower in resource-rich countries, poverty is higher after factoring in gross national income per capita, suggesting that resource wealth is not generally shared. Countries rich in natural resources fare particularly badly in terms of education and health outcomes— school participation and completion rates are far below those that national income would predict; infant mortality and stunting rates are also higher, and vaccination rates are lower. Resource-rich countries invest less in education and health than their national income would predict, and their investments tend to be only weakly associated with better outcomes. Introduction Over the past 15 years, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has experienced a boom in natural resources, and virtually all countries in the region are exploring new oil, natural gas, or mineral reserves. The region’s exports of oil alone are nearly triple its aid receipts (van der Ploeg and Venables 2011). Countries that had not previously been considered resource-rich are seeing a windfall of resource rents. Ghana’s Jubilee oil field, which entered production in 2010, averages more than 85,000 barrels a day, and Uganda’s Lake Albert rift fields target production of 200,000 barrels a day. Natural gas exploitation could potentially bring returns of billions of dollars to Mozambique and Tanzania. Natural resources hold promise of being a great boon to economic growth and individual well-being, but numerous studies point to the economic as well as the social, political, and institutional challenges that accompany natural resource riches (Africa Progress Panel 2013; Venables 2016). The specter of a “resource curse” shrouds the promise (Sachs and Warner 1999, 2001). But the success of several countries—Chile, Malaysia, and Norway, for example—in transforming 32 Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 natural resources into long-term development suggests that such a curse is not inevitable (Lederman and Maloney 2007). Harnessing the returns from natural resource wealth can contribute substantially to eradicating extreme poverty and enhancing shared prosperity. Success requires a series of good decisions and sound implementation. Recent declines in oil prices highlight just one of the risks associated with growth driven by natural resource wealth. Revenues from natural resources are volatile, and government strategies for managing these resources need to take into account the possibility of busts as well as booms and to address the challenge of transforming finite, volatile resources into sources of growth (figure 1.1). Governments and other stakeholders must grapple with (at least) four central questions when they seek to transform a finite amount of natural resources into lasting development (Barma and others 2012; van der Ploeg and Venables 2011; Venables 2016): 1. What is the optimal contract between government and entities that extract natural resources to balance public benefits with incentives to the private sector? 2. What is the optimal timing of extraction to ensure the maximum stream of benefits from reserves? 3. What is the optimal portfolio allocation of mineral revenues between consumption, savings, and investments? And what should be the profile of investments with regard to financial assets, physical capital (for example, infrastructure), and human capital? 4. How can resource revenue be spent most effectively and efficiently, and what complementary activities or reforms are required to ensure effectiveness and efficiency? Answers to these questions determine whether the benefits of natural resource extraction will last through the long term. This book focuses on questions 3 and 4, exploring, in particular, how long-term benefits can be achieved by investing in human capital—in part because this issue is too often overlooked. As the book makes clear, investing in human capital—understood broadly to include education, capabilities, and health—should be a central part of the strategy for converting natural resources into long-term development. It extends the time horizon of the natural resource windfall by converting a finite resource into a form of capital that can be preserved through generations, it helps to promote growth by distributing wealth broadly, and it helps to lay the foundation for broad-based economic development as natural resource revenues decline. However, investing well in human capital is hard; the track record of using natural resource wealth to lessen poverty and promote better education and health outcomes is not good. Moreover, because resource-rich countries tend not to spend much on human capital, and, because the challenges in delivering services Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries 33 From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 are exacerbated in these countries, the outcomes are not impressive. Spending wisely and directly confronting challenges that are unique to natural-resource-rich countries are both essential for success. Natural Resource Wealth, National Income, Poverty, and Inequality Natural resource wealth—and oil wealth in particular—has been supporting dramatic growth in national incomes in SSA countries. Between 1995 and 2013, gross national income (GNI) per capita in the region as a whole rose 50 percent. The gain was 80 percent in oil-rich countries, but substantially lower, at 40 percent, in non–resource-rich countries (figure 1.2). Countries identified as “potentially” resource-rich (with reserves identified but not yet extracted) also grew quickly (70 percent over the period), although this was from a much lower base and annual increases in income were smaller.1 Box 1.1 presents the country classifications. This chapter assesses the extent to which the higher national income resulting from this growth is associated with higher human capital outcomes and less inequality in those outcomes. It then assesses patterns of investment in human capital by different types of countries. The chapter uses new databases built from individual and household-level surveys to contrast levels and inequalities in outcomes between resource-rich and non–resource-rich countries, both within and beyond Sub-Saharan Africa. Figure 1.1 Strategies for Managing Resource Rents Need to Account for Booms and Busts: Index of the Real Price of Natural Resources, 1990–2015 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200 19 90 19 91 19 92 19 93 19 94 19 95 19 96 19 97 19 98 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10 20 11 20 12 20 13 20 14 20 15 20 16 In de x of p ric es (J an ua ry 2 01 0 = 10 0) Crude oil, average Natural gas index Copper Source: World Bank commodity price data (the Pink Sheet), http://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets. 34 Human Capital in Resource-Rich Countries From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 Figure 1.2 In SSA, Oil-Rich Countries Grew Substantially Faster Than Other Countries: Cumulative Growth in GNI per Capita, 1995–2013

What Do Teachers Know and Do? Does it Matter? Evidence from Primary Schools in Africa

Abstract: School enrollment has universally increased over the past 25 years in low-income countries. However, enrolling in school does not guarantee that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries learn little, and they complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills?the so-called "learning crisis." This paper uses data from nationally representative surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, representing close to 40 percent of the region's total population, to investigate possible answers to this policy failure by quantifying teacher effort, knowledge, and skills. Averaging across countries, the paper finds that students receive two hours and fifty minutes of teaching per day?or just over half the scheduled time. In addition, large shares of teachers do not master the curricula of the students they are teaching; basic pedagogical knowledge is low; and the use of good teaching practices is rare. Exploiting within-student, within-teacher variation, the analysis finds significant and large positive effects of teacher content and pedagogical knowledge on student achievement. These findings point to an urgent need for improvements in education service delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also provide a lens through which the growing experimental and quasi-experimental literature on education in low-income countries can be interpreted and understood, and point to important gaps in knowledge, with implications for future research and policy design.

An Economic Rationale for Investing in Human Capital

Abstract: There are compelling economic arguments for governments to invest in the human capital of their people—limited access to credit narrows household choices, information failures distort investments, and spillover effects lead to suboptimal family investments. Lack of access to capital is one reason for governments to invest little in human capital—a problem that natural resource revenues can help to overcome. Investing in human capital should be an important part of the portfolio of investments using resource revenues—along with investing in infrastructure and saving through mechanisms, such as sovereign wealth funds, that allow countries to earn international rates of return on investments. A balanced portfolio is desirable, and investing in human capital has a special role to play in resource-rich settings— especially in poor countries—where the need for human capital and infrastructure investments is large. The indirect effects of enhancing human capital on reducing the incidence and cost of conflict are also a large part of the story. Why Governments Should Invest in Human Capital “Perfect Markets” as a Reference Point When markets are functioning perfectly, households have a full range of choices about how to invest their disposable income. They can use their cash for consumption, savings, investing in education and training, and various other types of spending or investing. Since each type of spending has diminishing benefits, at least eventually, people would adjust their spending so that, as economists put it, the marginal returns are equalized across different types of spending. If markets were “perfect,” an additional dollar spent on building human capital would yield the same return as the interest rate obtained through savings. If it were higher, households would increase their spending on skills acquisition (perhaps financed 60 An Economic Rationale for Investing in Human Capital From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 by borrowing) until the marginal return were equalized—and the ultimate household level of investment in human capital would be optimal. In such perfect and complete markets, there would typically be no scope for the government to invest in building human capital, since households would behave optimally. However, markets are rarely perfect or complete. Indeed, the economic literature has identified several market “failures” that motivate public investments in human capital. This chapter reviews capital market failures, incomplete information, behavioral biases, and externalities. Credit Constraints Since private returns to human capital are high (box 2.1), it would seem inconceivable that households might choose not to send children to school. Even for very poor households, borrowing to invest in at least some years of education would be optimal. But financial markets are obviously not perfect, and studies Box 2.1 Private Returns to Human Capital While human capital is a broad concept that encompasses not only formal education but also skills, capabilities, and even health, estimating the effects of formal schooling has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. The literature on returns to education gives solid support to the notion that private returns are meaningful. A long economic tradition estimates private returns to education following a human capital approach and estimating so-called “Mincer regressions” that relate earnings to schooling and experience while controlling for a battery of factors (Becker 1975; Mincer 1958, 1974; Schultz 1960, 1961). Mincer regressions typically show large returns from education. For example, Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2004) found that the average rate of return on an additional year of schooling is 10 percent and that the returns are especially high for primary education in lowand middle-income countries. Schultz (2004) and Filmer and Fox (2014), focusing specifically on Africa, found that returns increase at higher levels of education. It is difficult to separate the effects of schooling on productivity from its signaling value. It could be that graduates of higher education do not earn more because of the productivityenhancing skills they have learned but because their admission to prestigious schools acts as a signaling device for classifying whether individuals have high or low innate ability (Brown and Sessions 2004; Spence 1973). The use of “natural experiments” allows analysts to distinguish the two effects. Card (2001) surveyed the growing literature that draws on natural experiments for estimating the return to schooling and found that, in many cases, the returns are similar to those of traditional Mincer regressions. For example, the estimate of Leigh and Ryan (2008) for Australia is about 10 percent, in line with Mincer regression estimates for comparable countries. Ozier (2015) found that attaining secondary school in Kenya causally leads to a decrease in the probability of low-skill (and low-earning) self-employment and an increase in the probability of (higher-earning) formal employment. Formal schooling is, of course, not the only way to raise human capital and earnings. A substantial literature shows that better nutrition for pregnant women and infants raises schooling box continues next page An Economic Rationale for Investing in Human Capital 61 From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 show that households underinvest in education when capital markets are imperfect (Becker 1967; Cordoba and Ripoll 2013; Fiszbein and others 2009; Lochner and Monge-Naranjo 2012). Because poverty and inequality today can breed poverty and inequality tomorrow, state intervention may be desirable (Banerjee and Newman 1993; Galor and Zeira 1993). The evidence is not only theoretical. Empirically, capital market frictions have been found to drive underinvestment in education (Lochner and Monge-Naranjo 2011). This has been shown for the United States (Carneiro and Heckman 2002) and for Mexico (Attanasio and Kaufmann 2009; Kaufmann 2014), as well as in an analysis of cross-country data (Flug, Spilimbergo, and Wachtenheim 1998). Borrowing constraints are a significant factor contributing to the large schoolingwealth gap in developing countries, with children from rich families much more likely to be enrolled at all levels of education (Filmer and Prichett 1999). Incomplete Information Though important, capital constraints are not likely to be the whole story. Even when returns on human capital are high, people may be reluctant to invest in it levels and economic productivity (Victora and others 2008). Strauss (1986), for example, found a very substantial positive impact of caloric intake on labor productivity in Sierra Leone. Further, comparing twins, Behrman and Rosenzweig (2004) and Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2007) found that lower birthweight has a serious impact on future educational attainment and earnings. These findings suggest that government programs to promote sufficient and balanced nutrition during pregnancy can help to boost human capital and economic output. Weil (2007) used such microeconomic estimates from various sources to estimate aggregate returns to health. He found that eliminating health differences between countries would reduce the variance of gross domestic product (GDP) per worker by nearly a tenth. Substantial scholarly attention has also been devoted to early childhood development. It has been found that both cognitive and noncognitive skills acquired in preschool significantly shape later education and labor market outcomes (Almond and Currie 2011). Several preschool intervention programs have had very high returns (Heckman 2006). For example, the Perry Preschool Program in the United States, which enrolled disadvantaged children starting at ages 3–4 and included both school programs and home visits, resulted in laterlife higher scores on achievement tests, high school graduation, and homeownership and lower rates of receipt of welfare assistance, out-of-wedlock births, and arrests for crime. The economic return rates for the program were 15–17 percent. The Abecedarian Program, also in the United States, enrolled participants at only 4 months of age and provided intensive day-long child care. It was found to permanently raise intelligence quotient (IQ) scores and noncognitive skills. A long-run study in Jamaica showed that cognitive stimulation in early childhood resulted in substantial increases in earnings in adulthood (Gertler and others 2014), as did a nutritional intervention among severely stunted children in Guatemala (Hoddinott and others 2008). Box 2.1 Private Returns to Human Capital (continued) 62 An Economic Rationale for Investing in Human Capital From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1005-3 if they are poorly informed about its benefits. Indeed, inaccurate beliefs about the average returns to education seem to play a major role. For example, studies in Madagascar (Nguyen 2008) and the Dominican Republic (Jensen 2010) found that many young people drastically underestimate the returns to schooling, and this reduces school attendance. Disseminating information to correct this underestimate was effective at boosting enrollment rates in both countries. Behavioral Biases Even with appropriate information, people have behavioral biases that help account for underinvestment in human capital (see Fiszbein and others 2009 for a comprehensive discussion). An extreme case, “hyperbolic discounting,” gives rise to a wide range of time-inconsistent behavior and self-control problems, such as procrastination. More concretely, when individuals put a much higher value on the present and a much lower value on the future, they tend to defer all actions that have high short-run costs and long-run gains, such as saving or investing in education. When tomorrow comes, the same distinctio

Schooling, Skills, and Success : trends and linkages in schooling and work among Cambodian youth - a cohort panel analysis

Abstract: Cambodia’s education sector has faced and overcome a number of challenges in recent history. Several decades of political and social unrest caused by the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and Vietnamese occupation in the 1980’s dealt a severe blow to the education system and left it in a state of disintegration. Primary and secondary enrollment through to the 1980’s fell, with school attendance dramatically lower for individuals who were teenagers in 1975 compared to previous or subsequent cohorts (de Walque, 2004). There were improvements by the following decade: The Paris Agreements and beginnings of UN sponsored elections ushered in a renewed focus on building and reconstructing schools and increasing the national budget allocation toward education, which reached 15.7 percent in 2001 (GAD/C 2002). Recent generations of youth enjoy greater access to schooling than previous ones; 49 percent of youth finish their education at a level higher than their father and 63 percent finish at a level higher than their mother (ILO, 2013). Net primary enrollments increased from 84 percent in 1992 to 96.4 percent in 2012, and net secondary enrollments from 16.6 percent in 2000 to 35 percent in 2012 (Tandon and Fukao, 2015). The labor market in Cambodia also went through a transformation in part due tostrong economic growth for the last two decades: salaried employment rose one-third in this period from 23 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2011 (ILO, 2013). As of 2015, Cambodia has attained the lower-middle-income status, with gross national income (GNI) per capita reaching US$1,070. Section one presents the data, a general overview of the cohort panel approach, and initial visual evidence on and discussion of cross-cohort patterns. Section two presents methods and results from our empirical exercise disentangling cohort versus age and time effects. Here we are able to get a more accurate insight into our first objective. Section three uses a regression analysis framework to present evidence on the relationship between early cohort experiences and labor adult labor market outcomes, our second objective. Section four concludes.