Return To Education And Parents Characteristics Evidence On Working Children In Indonesia

Children involvement in employment has gained many attentions from all over the world. On one hand, it is child’s right to develop themselves through education, adequate nutrition, caring from parents, as well as proper environment for their growth. On the other hand, poverty seems preventing children to have a decent growth. They even have to work in their earlier age not only as an added or substitute worker, but also as a permanent worker to help their family’s economy. Many policies and government intervention has been raised to tackle this phenomenon. However, recent research outcome found that poverty is not solely as a main factor that affects working children present in the family. This study tries to find the correlation between parents’ perception on return to education and parents’ characteristics, namely, parents’ health status, parents’ residence, as well as parents’ presence in the family, on the probability children will work. Using Heckman two-step model to calculate the return to education and probit regression on probability children will work, we found that return to education indeed has significant negative relationship on working children. This implies that an increase in return to education will reduce the probability that children have to work. Moreover, the significant positive relationship with parents’ residence and parents’ health condition proved that if a household experienced a “shock” situation such as parents’ absenteeism in the family or parents’ sickness, will increase the probability that children have to work. After all, combination policies to raise the importance of education as well as the availability of formal insurance are needed.

In 1973, the Indonesian government began one of the largest school construction programs ever. We use 2016 nationally representative data to examine the long-term and intergenerational effects of additional schooling as a child. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting variation across birth cohorts and regions in the number of schools built. Men and women exposed to the program attain more education, although women's effects are concentrated in primary school. As adults, men exposed to the program are more likely to be formal workers, work outside agriculture, and migrate. Households with parents exposed to the program have improved living standards and pay more government taxes. Education benefits are transmitted to the next generation. Increased parental education has larger impacts for daughters, particularly if mothers are exposed to school construction. Intergenerational results are driven by changes in the marriage partner's characteristics, with spouses having more education and improved labor market outcomes.

Since the early 2000s, Indonesia has taken a number of steps to prioritize early childhood development - ranging from the inclusion of Early Childhood Development (ECD) in the National Education System Law No. 20 in 2003 to a Presidential Declaration on Holistic and Integrated ECD and the launch of the country's first ever ECD Census in 2011. These policy milestones have occurred in parallel with sustained progress on outcomes included in the Millennium Development Goals, including for child malnutrition, child mortality and universal basic education. Additional progress could be achieved by strengthening ECD policies further. This report presents findings from an assessment of ECD policies and programs in Indonesia based on two World Bank tools: the ECD module of the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) and a guide on essential interventions for investing in young children. Results from the application of both tools to Indonesia are used to suggest a number of policy options for consideration.

In recent decades, important policies and programs-including nine-year compulsory education, pro-poor programs and the improvement of teacher quality-have been implemented to improve the availability and quality of schooling in Indonesia. However, to date, comprehensive research on the equity of the outcomes of these policies across the many schools and districts in Indonesia has never been conducted. This study aims to carry out a comprehensive analysis of education outcomes in Indonesia, covering the changes and patterns of education resources, the trends, patterns and determinants of school progression, and the patterns and determinants of student performance as measured by national exam scores. Survival and multilevel analyses are applied on a novel dataset constructed from a number of secondary datasets gathered from various sources. These secondary datasets include administrative data on schools, teachers and national exams, as collated by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC), the National Socio-Economic Survey (SUSENAS), the National Labour Force Surveys (SAKERNAS), the Village Census (PODES) and the administrative data on education finance from the Ministry of Finance. This study finds a continuous improvement over time in education progression, both in administrative data and household survey data. The equality of education survival across communities, for example, between urban and rural areas, between males and females, and across socio-economic statuses of the community, has been improving. However, the results also reveal that Indonesia still faces serious problems in school discontinuation. The decision to continue schooling is found to be affected not only by individual and household characteristics but also the characteristics of the districts in which the children reside. Gender is an important factor in school continuation, but the effect of gender varies across districts. Socio-economic characteristics of households measured by parents' education and economic status play an important role in determining school continuation. Against expectation, this study finds a trivial association between student continuation and education resources when measured by budget allocation and the availability of schools at the district level. Analyses of student performance suggest that student performance measured by national exam scores at junior secondary school in four tested subjects (Indonesian language, mathematics, science and language) varies across schools and across districts. Student performance is affected by the gender of the students and the effect varies across schools and districts. Students from higher socio-economic families perform significantly better than those from lower socio-economic families. Students perform even better if the schools have a larger proportion of students from higher socio-economic families. Unexpectedly, controlling for parental characteristics, school input has only a small influence on student performance. There is also a contradictory result that the budget for education allocated by the district government is negatively associated with all performance, except Indonesian language. Levels of gender development at the district level have a significant influence only on maths performance, but it is the performance of males, not females, in Indonesian language and English that is more influenced by the level of gender development in the labour market.

In Western countries, marriage and childbearing have consistently been shown to be major stages in the life cycle that affect women's employment continuity. Women in these countries generally withdraw from the workforce at marriage or at the onset of motherhood. However, in Indonesia, the characteristics and effects of such an interrupting feature in women's working patterns still remain unclear. Existing studies fail to explore the dynamic nature of employment behavior, particularly employment interruption which is a strong feature of women's labour market behavior. This thesis examines the factors that contribute to interruptions in women's employment in Indonesia. It adopts a discrete-time event history analysis to explore the determinants of female's transition out from and back into employment. It pays specific attention to the effect of the family life cycle on women's decision to leave and return to employment. Using a longitudinal data collection called the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), this thesis seeks to answer four questions: (1) To what extent and when do women experience work interruption?; (2) To what extent do marriage and childbearing influence women to leave employment?; (3) To what extent does being in the later stages of childrearing influence women to return to employment?; (4) What are the roles of education and employment characteristics in determining women's decisions to leave and return to work? The results of the analyses conducted in this study show that work interruption is common among women in Indonesia. Marriage and the onset of motherhood have been found to have a positive association with the risk of leaving employment. In particular, the effect of entering marriage on employment exit is stronger for women working in low-level occupations and for women with junior and senior secondary levels of education. This study also finds that having tertiary education and working in the public sector reduces the risk of experiencing an employment interruption. Meanwhile, the later stages of childrearing, measured by the age of the youngest child, have been found to have no significant effect on women's employment return. However, the presence of children does have a strong effect on the risk of returning to work in the informal rather than in the formal sector. The risk of reentering employment after a work interruption is also positively associated with the number of young children, indicating that women would return to work more quickly when the economic burden in the family increases. This study also finds that formal workers tend to be employed in the same sector when they decide to return to work.

The authors examine the impact of migration on educational attainment in rural Mexico. Using historical migration rates by state to instrument for current migration, they find evidence of a significant negative effect of migration on schooling attendance and attainment of 12 to 18 year-old boys and 16 to 18 year-old girls. IV-Censored Ordered Probit results show that living in a migrant household lowers the chances of boys completing junior high school and of boys and girls completing high school. The negative effect of migration on schooling is somewhat mitigated for younger girls with low educated mothers, which is consistent with remittances relaxing credit constraints on education investment for the very poor. However, for the majority of rural Mexican children, family migration depresses educational attainment. Comparison of the marginal effects of migration on school attendance and on participation in other activities shows that the observed decrease in schooling of 16 to 18 year-olds is accounted for by the current migration of boys and increased housework for girls.

"The unprecedented economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, together with school closures and inadequate government assistance, is pushing children into exploitative and dangerous child labor. As their parents have lost jobs or income due to the pandemic and associated lockdowns, many children have entered the workforce to help their families survive. Many work long, grueling hours for little or no pay, often under hazardous conditions. Some report violence, harassment, and pay theft. [This report] is based on interviews conducted from January to March 2021 with 81 children, ages 8-17, in Ghana, Nepal, and Uganda.... The report examines the impact of the pandemic on children's rights, including their rights to education, to an adequate standard of living, and to protection from child labor, as well as government responses."--Page 4 of cover.

This report provides guidance on how Indonesia can consolidate gains in access to basic education and develop an education system that will support an economy in transition towards high-income status.