The Little Things (0-3 Year Olds) that Can Have Big Impacts on China’s Human Capital and Economic Development

The Rohatyn Center on Global Affairs program on Global Economics, Development and Political Economy presents “The Little Things (0-3 Year Olds) that Can Have Big Impacts on China’s Human Capital and Economic Development” with Scott Rozelle.

It is well known in the international literature that there are high rates of delays of young children in poor families in low and middle income countries that can have long lasting impacts on both the families in the overall development of the country. When parents are trained to both provide their young children with better nutrition and psycho stimulation, in almost every country there are big impacts on the children’s cognition and language when they are young. However, overtime as the children go through elementary and junior high schools, these impacts fade away in almost every situation. In our paper, we follow a cohort of children who are part of a randomized control trial when they were one year old in 2014 and look at the impact of a parental training program when they were three years old, five years old in preschool and 11-year-old in elementary school. We compare the impacts of these programs versus more traditional investments into education and show that China, unlike the rest of the developing world, can sustain the effects of early childhood development interventions, and that these have very large impacts (or there is no fade-out) when the children are 11 years old.

In person event. 
For more information on the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, please visit our website.