Publication Type

Working Paper

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2021

Abstract

While past two decades have witnessed a remarkable educational progress in Vietnam, ethnic minority children consistently lagged behind ethnic majority children in academic performance. The government of Vietnam has stepped up efforts to assist ethnic minority students in their learning by lowering the linguistic and cultural barriers they face. Among such efforts is the textbook supply program, and we examine its impact on the learning of children proxied by vocabulary test. We apply difference-in-differences estimation to four rounds of the Young Lives data between 2006 and 2015 in order to investigate how the textbook supply program narrowed the gap between the ethnic minority and majority over time. We show that the textbook supply program became more effective in narrowing the ethnic gap as the education policy in Vietnam became reoriented towards ethnic minority children. We also conduct a causal mediation analysis to explore the relevance of behavioural response through the change in time use. The result of this analysis suggests that increased study time is possibly a moderate mediator through which the textbook supply program helps narrow the ethnic gap in the test score only for the young cohort over and above the direct impact from the textbook program. This paper therefore alludes to the importance of delivering carefully designed materials for the target group to bring about meaningful behavioral changes. It also corroborates the findings from the recent literature on teaching at the right level.

Keywords

Ethnic minority, mediation, difference in differences, PPVT, Vietnam

Discipline

Asian Studies | Education | Growth and Development | Race and Ethnicity

Research Areas

Applied Microeconomics

First Page

1

Last Page

31

Publisher

SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series, Paper No. 02-2021

City or Country

Singapore

Embargo Period

4-29-2021

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Comments

Published in Review of Development Economics (2023) DOI: 10.1111/rode.12978

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