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PRB Discuss Online: The Increasing Importance of Education for Longevity in the United States

June 9, 2011

Many people know that individuals with higher levels of education tend to live longer and healthier lives than individuals with low levels of education. In a recent study, Robert Hummer and colleagues built on this knowledge by demonstrating new important characteristics of the relationship between education and adult mortality in the United States.

Among their findings: Each year of education does not have the same “meaning” in terms of reduced mortality risk of U.S. adults; and the data on mortality of more highly educated individuals shows less dispersion than the data on mortality of less educated individuals. The researchers also refined key pathways by which educational attainment influences adult mortality risk, including much higher levels of cigarette smoking among the less educated; and better jobs, higher income, and greater access to health insurance and social ties and resources among the more highly educated. Hummer and his colleagues also determined that over the past two decades, there has been increasing inequality in mortality risk by education in the United States.

In a PRB Discuss Online, Robert Hummer, Centennial Commission professor of liberal arts at the University of Texas, Austin, answered questions from participants about the relationship between education and longevity in the United States.

June 9, 2011 NOON (EDT)

Transcript of Questions and Answers

OLASEINDE OLUGBENGA SUNDAY: Can the same factor—education—introduce lopsidedness in the adult mortality trend of the developing world like Nigeria, taking into cognizance, some other mortality risks exposure which are avoidable in the developed countries but prevail in the third world countries?
Robert Hummer: Thank you for your question…it is a good one. Overall, I would be surprised if a high level of education was not associated with greater longevity in Nigeria. Such a pattern will not be true for everyone, of course…that is, some highly educated people will die at relatively young ages. But following the work of sociologists Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, I view education as a very important flexible resource…a resource that allows highly educated people to generally make good decisions about their health and health behavior and benefit from the socioeconomic resources (such as good jobs and high income) that tend to come from achieving a high level of education. While I am unfortunately not an expert on Nigeria, I would expect that highly educated people in Nigeria will better be able to avoid health risks than less educated people and, therefore, on average live longer than their less educated counterparts.

J Kishore: Education means adopting healthy and useful behavior. Educated people are more aware of them so possibility to use them help them to live healthy and longer. Those people who are educated but do not want to change their behavior for healthy lifestyle would continue to live shorter than the lives of less educated who have changed their behavior to healthy lifestyle. Still it is worth to have educated population because its group effect on overall longevity should be beneficial. Will it be beneficial for Indian population?
Robert Hummer: Thank you for your question. I have little doubt that higher levels of education will be beneficial for the overall health and longevity of the Indian population. The relationship between education and longevity is strong in every context I have examined. While not every high educated person will live a long life and not every low educated person will die early, on balance, I do think that education works to improve health and improve longevity given all the data we have accumulated on the subject.

Dr. Anima Sharma: Hi, I am finding the topic of this discussion very interesting however, I have my own views when we talk about India or other third world countries. You know, relating education with longevity is a bit dicey in our case. I may be wrong but you know my observation is, we can correlate education with modern ways of life and modern ways of life give rise to modern types of work related diseases and urbanism. Ultimately, I find that my counterparts who are living close to nature, eating, breathing and living fresh natural life have better life expectency though these configurations have been affected by the development activities. It is a common belief in the countries like India that with education people become more prone to living artificial life and their life-style also changes, which finally affects their health and viz. a viz. longevity. In Developed countries the situation may be different and because I have no experience of working in the US hence I am not opposing your observations but I am humbly putting forward my experiences. Hope you will have something to say in this regards too.
Robert Hummer: Hello Dr. Sharma: Thank you for your question. This is a really, really interesting point you raise. And, unfortunately, I have no experience working with Indian data or on India. I guess I will offer two initial thoughts:

I think it will be really important to study the relationship between education, health, and longevity in India as it unfolds across time…and not only for the country as a whole, but also for different subgroups within the country (for example, separately in both urban areas and rural areas).
My experience with data from the United States and my review of European research suggests that high education is strongly correlated with good health and greater longevity in every context in which it is studied. This is because education is a critical, and flexible, resource that is used by individuals in ways that, on average, tend to work toward improved well-being and health across the life course.

Thus, I would be surprised if a similar pattern did not unfold in India…but, of course, we’ll need data and studies to do this work!

Donald A. Collins, President: Isn’t it true that old people like me (I am 80 but thinking of those 65 and over) will continue to contribute increasingly to the nation’s work needs? This implies that we emphasize admitting skilled immigrants, not millions of unskilled as we now do.
Robert Hummer: Dear President Collins: Yes, it also seems to me that older individuals will become an even more important portion of the labor force looking ahead. Thus, I think increasing levels of education among adults will be more and more important in the years ahead—to improve skill levels, and to help keep people healthier and productive for many years. I have a forthcoming paper that shows that additional education during the adult years helps to improve health…so it is not just education that is obtained during childhood and adolescence that matters.

Aberto Rizo: Having lived in Western European countries I have seeing seniors affected of chronic illnesses such as Diabetes, Arthritis, Cancers, Hypertension and Mental conditions, etc cared in hospices. I have also visited organized communities for seniors who are able to care for themselves. Is the “extended family model” type of care for the old prevalent in middle income countries a good alternative to promote? – Alberto Rizo G., MD, MPH, Bogota, Colombia
Robert Hummer: Dear Dr. Rizo: Unfortunately, I have no expertise on actual caregiving. My educated guess is that committed family members are usually important resources in terms of caregiving…

Rohit mehta: What step should India take to curtail the declining sex ration in the early age group and to improve it also?
Robert Hummer: I’m sorry, but I unfortunately am not an expert in research on sex ratios.

Tyjen Tsai: Do you distinguish between vocational education/training and general education in your study?
Robert Hummer: This is another excellent question…and it simply depends on the availability of data. Whenever possible, I do…and, for example, some of my work clearly shows that people with high school equivalency degrees (e.g., a GED) have higher mortality than people with standard high school degrees. They are not equivalent…at least in terms of their associations with mortality. So I do think such distinctions can be very important. Research-wise, I think it is very important to try and gather as much detail as possible about the education of individuals, so that we can better understand the health and mortality consequences of all forms of schooling.

Nir, F.: education leads to higher exposure of reading medical materials, knowing the importance of healthier nutrition, etc. my question is what are the explaning variables you use in order to quantify this exposure? and also what variables of education do you use (by years of schooling, diplomas, etc.)?
Robert Hummer: This is an excellent question. My work has focused on both years of schooling as well as degrees (e.g., High School Diploma, College Diploma, etc…). Each year of education is associated with reduced mortality. But my group’s work also clearly shows that:

Each additional year prior to a high school diploma is associated with reduced mortality, but not by all that much with each additional year.
The achievement of a high school diploma is associated with a very sizable reduction in mortality.
After a high school diploma, each additional year is associated with a sizable reduction in mortality that is of greater magnitude than the lower years of education.
There is no “ceiling effect” of education in terms of reduced mortality…even at very high levels of education, additional years are associated with lower mortality.

To explain this relationship (i.e., mediators), I use sets of variables that include earned income, social resources, health behaviors, and physiological markers of health.

Ryan: Regarding the problems young people are having today affording higher education, what effect do you see a potential/actual drop in college attendance having on health and mortality in the US in the near future as well as decades from now?
Robert Hummer: Dear Ryan: This is an excellent question…and I worry about this a lot. But I not only worry about this in terms of affordability, I also worry about it in terms of wide-ranging access to education and the quality of education.

My group’s research findings strongly suggest that education is increasingly important for health and mortality in the United States. And we also have shown that the effects of education play out over the life course…across decades and decades of time. Thus, my sense is that what we do now in terms of education—at all levels, not only including college—is going to impact the nation’s health for many decades looking ahead. In my view, educational funding and policy decisions are critical health policy decisions as well.

Diana Lavery: Hi Dr. Hummer, I was interested to read in one of your responses that there was no “ceiling effect”—meaning that even at very high levels of education, additional years are still associated with longer life expectancy. I think of years in very high levels of education to include a lot of high-stress situations, lower levels of sleep, lower income levels (especially for Ph.D. students), and increased debt—all things that I would associate with lower life expectancy (although I am not an expert). So are there reasons known as to why the “ceiling effect” does not exist?
Robert Hummer: Dear Diana: This is a great question. Until the last few years, we’ve had no national data, to my knowledge, on the mortality patterns of people with very high levels of education. And surely, the types of stresses/debts/etc…that you raise are very real and important. That said, my sense is that such stresses/debts are often short-term…and, over the life course, people who earn very high degrees are rewarded…with better jobs, higher incomes, stable access to care, fabulous access to health information and technologies, and very useful social networks. So, in the end, such benefits accumulate across the life course to result in lower mortality for persons with very high levels of education. Again, though, such findings are brand new, to my knowledge, so it will take more research to better understand the low mortality experienced by persons with very high levels of education.

Diana Lavery: Thanks Dr. Hummer, I work on measuring child well-being in the U.S., and I know that there is a significant amount of research that shows the importance of preschool for many later life outcomes. Does your study take into account those who attended preschool? If so, are there any interesting findings?
Robert Hummer: Sure! I sure wish I as able to take into account preschool education. Indeed, from a “human capital” perspective, education builds, or accumulates, across the life course, allowing individuals to gain greater control over their lives, apply knowledge in key situations, etc… So I would not be surprised to find out that education at all levels, even including preschool, had beneficial effects (on average) down the road for health and longevity. A related literature that my colleague Mark Hayward works in focuses on a range of “early life” conditions on health and longevity…and indeed, childhood experiences such as poverty and child health have impacts on adult health and mortality decades later. So I would not at all be surprised to see early life education having effects on adult health and mortality.

Thanks for the questions…and good luck with your work!

PRB Discuss Online: Remittances, and the Recession’s Effects on International Migration

May 26, 2011

About 3 percent of the world’s people are international migrants, living outside their country of birth for a year or more. Two-thirds of these migrants leave developing countries for developed or other developing countries, and the remittances they send home—around $325 billion in 2010—are larger than total official development aid.

The 2008-2009 recession slowed migrant entries into developed countries but did not lead to large-scale returns. International migration is increasing, making the management of migration an ever greater concern. Martin’s latest PRB web article, “Remittances, and the Recession’s Effects on International Migration,” is an update of his 2008 Population Bulletin, “Managing Migration: The Global Challenge.” In a PRB Discuss Online, Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, answered questions from participants about remittances; and the recession’s effects on international migration.

May 26, 2011 1 PM (EDT)

Transcript of Questions and Answers

Seth Frimpong: How can skills and employment be created to reduce international migration in Africa?
Philip Martin: This is hard to answer. Many African countries spend relatively more on higher education than on K-12 schooling, which leads to “too many” university graduates who cannot find jobs, prompting them to emigrate. This brain drain can slow development at home, but the losses may be somewhat offset by remittances from professionals abroad who send back remittances.

Ehsan: What are the effects of the recession on the educated and uneducated migrants? I have seen many uneducated Pakistani migrants returning back from UAE due to unemployment.
Philip Martin: The overall story is that international labor migration did NOT fall sharply in 2008-09. Only a few countries followed the example of Malaysia, where the government told employers to lay off foreign workers to open jobs for Malaysians, and soon rescinded this order. However, some construction projects in the UAE were halted and workers sent home in the middle of 3-year contracts, just as migrant workers were displaced in North Africa. However, from a global perspective, the main pattern is fewer new deployments rather than large-scale returns.

Trilochan Pokharel: There were debates during the period of recession as some developed countries like UK relaxed immigration policy for allowing large number of education migrants. It was considered as their strategy to cope with recession by collecting education revenue. Some other countries also relaxed immigration policy for attracting skilled labour force from developing world. Do you think that those strategies worked to shape international migration? Recently, many developing countries are much worried about potentially declining remittance and reduction in foreign employment because of political instability in the middle-east than the 2008 recession. What could be the implication of these instances in global international migration?
Philip Martin: Australia, the UK, and the US have a number of private and public language schools and universities that depend on tuition from foreign students. Rapid economic growth in China, India, and elsewhere makes foreign study more affordable, increasing enrollments. There have been recent changes to laws and regulations in Australia and the UK that will make it harder for some foreign students to enter for study, but other changes can make it easier for graduates of local universities to stay and work, esp. in Canada and the US.

Demonstrations led to the downfall of entrenched leaders in Tunisia and Egypt in winter 2011; NATO provided assistance to rebels in Libya. There were two major migration outcomes. First, there were large-scale repatriations of Asian and African migrants, and second, over 25,000 Tunisians traveled by boat to the Italian island of Lampedusa, which has fewer than 5,000 permanent residents. The Italian government asked the EU for help to care for the migrants and sent advisors to Tunisia to help Tunisian police to block the departure of boats with migrants headed for Italy. The EU refused to implement a burden-sharing agreement, prompting the Italian government on April 5, 2011 to issue Tunisians in Italy temporary papers that allowed them to travel to France, where many had relatives, prompting France to stop trains from Italy at its border.

Second, many of the estimated 1.5 million African and Asian migrants in Libya were displaced by fighting, and 665,000 migrants left Libya for Egypt or Tunisia by the end of April 2011. Some countries quickly arranged to transport their citizens home, including China and Turkey, while the nationals of other countries were left to fend for themselves, including Bangladeshis and Nepalese and many Africans. Donors provided funds to IOM and other international organizations to fly home migrants from Asian countries who crossed the Libyan-Tunisia border. Many Africans were left to fend for themselves.

Alex Kojo Boahoma: How beneficial or detrimental is brain-drain (migration of principally unemployed and underemployed graduates) to the development of African Countries?
Philip Martin: Remittances to developing countries were $325 billion in 2010, and are expected to be higher in 2011 (www.worldbank.org/prospects/migrationandremittances). Remittances are almost three times Official Development Assistance but less than Foreign Direct Investment to developing countries, which was about $400 billion in 2010.

About half of the 73 million migrants from developing countries who were in industrial countries in 2010 were in their almost 600-million strong labor force, that is, about six percent of workers in industrial countries were migrants. Most migrants in industrial are low-skilled, as with Mexicans in the US, but many are highly skilled, such as Indian IT workers in the US and Europe. Migrants in industrial countries likely contribute about the same share to industrial country GDP as their share of the work force, 6 percent.

J Kishore: Dear Sir, How many dollars international migrants earned in developed countries and how much they are sending to their birth countries? Can we say most of the productivity of developed nation is because of these migrant professional laborers.
Philip Martin: Remittances to developing countries were $325 billion in 2010, and are expected to be higher in 2011 (www.worldbank.org/prospects/migrationandremittances). Please refer to my response to Alex.

Donghui Yu: Do you have updated number of Chinese American remittances to China? What’s the characteristics of Chinese remittances?
Philip Martin: China and India are the largest recipients of remittances—see www.worldbank.org/prospects/migrationandremittances.

A.RANJITHKUMAR: migration is a national and international problem, what is major reason for it?
Philip Martin: People move for many reasons. See www.prb.org/Publications/PopulationBulletins/2008/managingmigration.aspx.

A.RANJITHKUMAR: respected sir, do you agree that international migrations affect national development? how it can be give solution as your opinion
Philip Martin: See more at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/. The number of international migrants, defined as people outside their country of birth or citizenship for a year or more, regardless of purpose or legal status, almost doubled between 1980 and 2005 to 191 million.

Half of the world’s migrants are workers in destination countries. The incentive for especially young people to cross national borders for economic opportunity is rising because of increased demographic and economic inequalities. Meanwhile, revolutions in communications and transportation make it easier to cross national borders, and the rights revolution of the past half century has enabled some migrants to stay abroad. With inequalities hard to reduce, and strong economic forces encouraging more communications and transportation links, governments have tried to manage migration by adjusting the rights of individuals.

Managing Labor Migration in the Twenty-First Century is a three-part, seven-chapter book that explores the major labor migration flows around the world and how countries are managing them. Particular attention is focused on the extremes of the job ladder, the migration of professionals such as IT specialists as well as unskilled farm workers. All of the programs examined are controversial, suggesting that there is no magic formula for moving workers across borders.

About 40 percent of the world’s migrants move from one developing country to another, and Chapter 6 explores labor migration issues in Thailand, one of the East Asian tiger economies. In less than a decade, the employment of migrants from poorer neighboring countries spread from border areas to the booming Bangkok area, with employers asserting that, without migrants, they would go out of business. Efforts to substitute Thais for migrants after the 1997-98 financial crisis largely failed, and the Thai government continues to periodically re-register migrants that it expects to eventually return.

In an ideal world, there would be few barriers to migration and very little unwanted migration, as within the US or the EU. Achieving fewer and lower migration barriers will require economic development in migrant-sending areas, and the final chapter explores the effects of the 3 R’s of migration; recruitment, remittances, and returns, on economic development. Migration can set in motion virtuous circles, as when sending Indian IT workers abroad leads to new industries and jobs in India, or set in motion vicious circles, as when the exit of professionals from Africa leads to less health care and too few managers to operate factories.

Martin, Philip, Manolo Abella and Christiane Kuptsch. 2006. Managing Labor Migration in the Twenty-First Century. Yale University Press. http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300109040.

Erin Hofmann: Your article mentioned that the recession has affected migrants working in construction and manufacturing more than those working in healthcare and services. Since healthcare and service workers are often women, has the global recession led to an increased share of women among international migrants?
Philip Martin: Probably yes, but we do not have current data on migrant workers by sex—about half of all migrants are women: www.unmigration.org

Robert Winfield: What countries do you see migrant labour targeting next (e.g. Poland has the potential to become a remittance send market), or do you believe as the recession improves the traditional migrant destinations will continue to be the main destinations? Also do you see technology (e.g. mobile) having a significant impact on the distribution of remittances to developing countries?
Philip Martin: Some migrant-sending countries, such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka, have govt agencies that “market” their workers abroad. Until recently, Libya was a major “new” market. Migrant-sending countries are looking for new destinations including fast-growing countries in Eastern Europe such as Poland as well as Australia and Canada, which are benefitting from the commodities boom.

The single largest remitter is Western Union, with 445,000 locations where people can send money to others. Western Union says there are 16,000 “migration corridors” world wide, meaning significant flows of money from one country to another. Sending money over national borders is growing rapidly because it is cheap and less regulated than banks. In some countries such as Africa, the transfer involves minutes of air time rather than cash.

Seth Frimpong: What is the Significance of migration to Africa’s youth and their descendants?
Philip Martin: Many Africans would like to migrate, and a combination of the world’s fastest population growth—Africa’s population is projected to double to 2 billion in the next 40 years—and lower incomes at a time of globalization is likely to encourage especially African youth to seek to emigrate. It is relatively hard for Africans to migrate long distances; most African immigrants in the US are well educated. However, Europe fears boatloads of migrants leaving from North Africa or from Senegal to Spain’s Canary Islands. The question is whether economic development in Africa will be fast enough to discourage such migration.

Erin Hofmann: At the global level, remittances fell in 2008-09, then recovered in 2009-10. Did remittances fall less, or recover more quickly from some source countries than others? (I’m thinking mostly about the levels of remittances sent from major migrant destination areas like the US, Europe, Russia, Gulf states.)
Philip Martin: See http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=3666_0_5_0.

The World Bank estimated that migrants sent $325 billion to developing countries in 2010, up from $307 billion in 2009. India received $55 billion in remittances in 2010; China $51 billion; Mexico $23 billion; and the Philippines, $21 billion; Bangladesh was the fifth largest developing country recipient with $11 billion. The World Bank projects rising remittances to developing countries, $346 billion in 2011 and $374 billion in 2012. Remittances did not fall as much as expected in 2008-09 because net migration from developing to industrial countries remained positive. Most migrants in industrial countries remained there. Further, migrants abroad reduced their living costs in order to maintain remittance payments. Migrants employed in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia continued to remit despite the recession.

Sub-Saharan African countries, among those least affected by the 2008-09 global recession, received an estimated $22 billion in remittances in 2010. Data for individual African countries are not fully reliable, and there are often major discrepancies between IMF remittance estimates and central bank reports. For example, the IMF estimated $125 million in remittances to Ghana in 2008, while the Ghana central bank estimated $1.6 billion.

Mobile telephones and the internet are reducing the cost of sending small sums over national borders. The World Bank estimated that the cost of sending $200 internationally fell from $19.60 in 2008 to $17.40 in 2010. The US-Mexican remittance corridor is one of the cheapest, while sending small sums over national borders is much more expensive in Sub-Saharan Africa and between New Zealand and Pacific Islands.

Many poor Africans make remittance transfers within countries by transferring minutes of calling time to the recipient. Some mobile phone operators are trying to develop minute-transfer programs that can be used by migrants in one country to send calling time to recipients in other countries.

PRB Discuss Online: The Tsunami, Six Years Later: Results of a Large-Scale Longitudinal Study in Aceh, Indonesia

December 22, 2010

Dec. 26, 2010, will mark the sixth anniversary of the earthquake that spawned a tsunami on the coastlines of countries bordering the Indian Ocean. In collaboration with the Indonesian NGO SurveyMETER, Elizabeth Frankenberg, Duncan Thomas, and colleagues designed a survey to study how the disaster affected villagers living in areas heavily damaged by the tsunami. They collected data from a sample of 40,000 people in Aceh before the tsunami, and afterward tracked them for five years. How has the population of Aceh been affected by the 2004 tsunami, and how has the recovery process unfolded? In a PRB Discuss Online, Elizabeth Frankenberg, professor of public policy and sociology at Duke University; and Duncan Thomas, professor of economics at Duke University, answered questions from participants about the short-term and long-term consequences of the 2004 tsunami.

Dec. 22, 2010 1 PM (EST)

Transcript of Questions and Answers

Dr. Gunaselvam: How were the fishermen in Aceh relocated as they always prefer to live near the coast?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Some fishermen and their families moved inland to refugee camps in the period shortly after the tsunami, but some never left at all. In general, those who lived near the coast before the tsunami moved back to the coast, because they wanted to return to their home areas. Thus, for the most part, fishermen did not permanently relocate.

Grace Larobina: How has the basic social unit of the family survived? What has happened to the children orphaned by the disaster? What has been the incidence of mental health amongst survivors?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Family has been an extremely important element in the process of recovering from the tsunami. In the most heavily damaged areas, around one in five children lost one parent and one in 20 lost both parents. Those who lost one parent continued to live with the surviving parent and many of those parents, particularly fathers, have remarried since the tsunami. The vast majority of children who lost both parents in the tsunami are living with other relatives. In some cases, older orphans are at boarding school. In other cases, orphans have been taken in by families from the same community they were living in at the time of the tsunami. In the heavily damaged areas, survivors suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress after the tsunami. These symptoms were also experienced, though to a lesser degree, among residents of areas with moderate and light damage. After two or three years, the symptoms have diminished for the majority of the people. There remains a significant subset of people who have recovered less successfully.

Geoff Dabelko: What has been the relative balance of long versus short term thinking in building back and restoring livelihoods? How much evidence of more sustainable/lower vulnerability approaches such as mangrove regeneration, moving structures back from the coast, diversifying livelihood from fishing etc?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: This is an important question, but it and its answer are complicated. On many dimensions of physical infrastructure, attention has been paid to building back “better”; and roads, bridges, and facilities such as health clinics and schools are of better quality. This includes housing. In some areas mangroves have been planted. Although there was some consideration of protecting a zone along the coast, there does not seem to have been a systematic effort to prevent rebuilding close to the coast. A lot of employment opportunities were generated from the reconstruction effort, and some four years after the tsunami employment levels were higher than before the tsunami, but we don’t know yet whether levels will stay high as the reconstruction effort subsides. One positive feature has been that cessation of the civil war has made farming more feasible, because one can work in the fields more safely than when the conflict was at its height.

Sushmita Mukherjee: How successful was the longitudinal study as a methodology? What proportion of population you could track down in these six years? Please elaborate on the success of the methodology to study at a emergency site.
Elizabeth Frankenberg: We believe that a longitudinal methodology is extremely important to understand the impact of the tsunami precisely because of all the upheaval that occurred. Because we have a sample of the population prior to the tsunami, we are able to measure the impact of the tsunami on these people and figure out how they have adjusted to the tsunami. We followed people to emergency sites such as refugee camps and interviewed them there. But many people moved to homes of friends and family. These people are systematically different from those who we found in emergency sites—both before the tsunami and after the tsunami. Focusing only on those who went to emergency sites would provide a biased picture of who was affected by the tsunami and its impact. Moreover, some people did not leave their home sites but camped among the ruins—and these people are also different from those who were displaced. Developing a full picture of the impact of the tsunami would be very difficult without the longitudinal design. That said, longitudinal designs are challenging to implement. We started with a (pre-tsunami) sample of over 40,000 individuals of all ages who are representative of the population living along the coast of Aceh and North Sumatra provinces. We were able to ascertain survival status for more than 95 percent of those people. We have conducted an interview with each of the people in our study about once a year since the tsunami. In each survey round, we have completed interviews with roughly 90 percent of the households. The household-level interviews give us some information on all household residents, including those who have moved out, but the rates of recontact for individuals vary from year to year. Working age males are the most difficult group to talk to face-to-face. It is important to emphasize that our team, from SurveyMETER (an Indonesian NGO), Statistics Indonesia (the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics), and Duke-UCLA, was beginning with information on a representative sample BEFORE the tsunami, so we knew whom to look for. With that foundation in place, arguably the most important elements of success are having a deeply committed team that builds a very good rapport with the people in our survey. In addition, the interviewers are committed to doing everything they can to locate the people in our study, including those who have moved. This commitment, in combination with a sophisticated data management system that enable us to send clues about where someone has moved to interviewers working in that area means that we have been exceptionally successful in interviewing the people who have been good enough to participate in this study.

Rune Slettebak: Theories within research on post-disaster behavior range from expecting increased levels of aggression due to (among other things) relative deprivation and post-traumatic stress, to increased social cohesion and solidarity. Do the data give any clues on how individuals in Aceh have responded in terms of cohesion/aggression/no difference?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Civic participation is an important part of life in Aceh. We designed the study to provide insights into the role civic participation played in the aftermath of the tsunami. In many communities it appears that residents did work together successfully to address needs for clean up and rebuilding that emerged in the tsunami’s aftermath. The combination of the cessation of the civil war and the availability of funds for reconstruction seem to have helped pave the way for social cohesion to play a role. But this dynamic is not likely uniform across all villages, and the story may be different particularly in communities where the civil war had taken a toll before the tsunami. Unfortunately, we have little information about civic participation prior to the tsunami. The baseline survey was part of the annual national socio-economic survey, SUSENAS, conducted by Statistics Indonesia. Since that survey did not collect information on aggression, we did not attempt to collect information that would provide insights into whether levels of aggression have changed for individuals.

Dr. Yasmin Siddiqua: Please explain little bit about the survey before Tsunami and the way the surveyed people were tracked for five years. I assume the changes are captured in terms of their social status (e.g., economic status, hygiene behavior, etc.) as well as their health behavior. Please shed a light on these issues, if the study have captured these. Does the study also covered their family structure and norm and gender issue? How can we get a summary or main report?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: After the tsunami, our team from SurveyMETER Indonesia and Duke-UCLA worked with Statistics Indonesia to try to relocated a subset of households that were part of their annual socioeconomic survey, SUSENAS, conducted in February 2004. SUSENAS is widely regarded as an extremely high quality survey that is nationally representative and provides on-going information on the socio-economic well-being of the Indonesian population. The collaboration between Statistics Indonesia, SurveyMETER and ourselves is unique and a testament to our common goal of providing evidence on the impact of the tsunami for future planning and mitigation efforts. Our first step, in 2005, was to return to each community to try to find information about all the members of the 2004 households. If information in the local area suggested that a household (or an entire group of households) had relocated, either because of the tsunami or for other reasons, we recorded that information, and made visits to the destination areas. A lot of effort was spent in visiting and revisiting origin areas and destination areas, searching for informants who could provide clues, and then organizing and transmitting that information. We collected information about household composition, multiple dimensions of socioeconomic status including work and earnings, self-employment activities, assets and spending, physical and psychosocial health status, use of health services, schooling, migration, and so on. The short term implications of the tsunami for most of these dimensions of well-being were strong and negative in heavily damaged areas, but over time improvements in both community-level infrastructure and household-level assets has been substantial. The study covers household composition, family formation, and fertility, but does not ask many questions about gender norms, per se.

Puneet: How much difference has aid from external sources helped in rehabilitation as compared to local ones? And what are both immediate and long-term implications of such aid?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: It is difficult to draw a distinction between the effectiveness of assistance from external versus local sources. This is for two reasons. First, in many instances, assistance from different sources tends to be co-mingled. Second, in other cases, anecdotal evidence suggests that a donor provides funds to an area or for a project because funds from another donor are provided to a different project. Our sense is that the external and local sources of aid have tended to play a complementary role. The large inflow of external aid into heavily damaged areas has made it possible for Indonesian assistance to provide assistance in other parts of Aceh where infrastructure needed attention in the aftermath of the conflict. Overall, the assistance has made a tremendous difference with respect to improving the physical infrastructure with respect to roads, bridges, health facilities, schools, and also housing. The long term implication is that the physical infrastructure of many parts of Aceh has improved. How the structure of the economy will evolve as aid spending diminishes is less clear.

Global Health: How many residents of Aceh province lost health care access following the 2004 tsunami? Many thanks!
Elizabeth Frankenberg: In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, a substantial proportion of Aceh’s population experienced disruptions in access to care, because population density is higher in the coastal areas, where the damage occurred, than in inland areas. In the communities we surveyed, nearly two-thirds of those in heavily damaged areas had health facilities that were damaged or destroyed, and nearly three-quarters of those communities experienced damage or destruction of elementary schools. In some instances residents could use the facilities of nearby communities where damage was less extensive. We have not done a projection from our sample to the total size of the population affected by reduced access to facilities.

Ghazy Mujahid: The Tsunami provided a lot of lessons. Hope we will learn from it particularly because of the enormous cost of the lessons. Does this study throw light on the impact on the elderly population? In disasters they usually suffer relative neglect in rescue, relief & rehabilitation work. I had coordinated the production of “Older Population in Indonesia: Trends, Issues and Policy Responses” issued as Papers in Population Ageing No. 3 by the UNFPA Bangkok Office in 2007. The author (Professor Abikusno) devoted an entire section to the issue. He had done a paper on the issue and for those interested the details are: “Needs and Follow Up of Older Persons and Disabled Tsunami Victims in Nias Island,” presented at Women Empowerment Policy Development Meeting, Ministry of Women Empowerment, Hotel Acacia, Jakarta, 24th March 2004. I hope this longitudinal study has also paid special attention to the elderly population. It would also be useful to have the views of participants in this discussion today.
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Thanks very much for your comment and for pointing us to this report. We have done some analysis of outcomes for older adults relative to younger adults. The older population was clearly disadvantaged with respect to survival, but for other outcomes the results are more nuanced. Mental health outcomes, and the recovery trajectory with respect to symptoms of post-traumatic stress, do not appear to be worse for older adults, and older adults may have been sheltered a bit from living in camps. Older men who lost a wife have remarried, but older women who lost a husband have not remarried. Older men do not appear to reentered the labor market to the same extent as older men, but their consumption patterns have recovered to the same degree as other demographic groups. For the most part our results suggesting that the family has been an important safety net for older individuals.

Nose: In my previous post, I wanted to ask if you can know the pre-tsunami baseline family status in the longitudinal data, and study the change of family characteristics after the tsunami.
Elizabeth Frankenberg: The baseline for our survey was a survey conducted by Statistics Indonesia in 2004, which provides information on the demographic composition of households, and on the socioeconomic status of those households. We are able to study how households changed after the tsunami because of death of members, and with respect to who moves in and who moves out to establish a new household. We can also examine changes in characteristics of the designated household head, and phenomena such as remarriage and fertility after the tsunami.

Qudratullah: How much the land and the people have gone back to what was their pre-tsunami state of conditions?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Impressive. The debris from the tsunami’s destruction has been removed and plants have grown up on land that the tsunami denuded. In many areas crops and fishponds are back in place, although sometimes a different crop has been planted. Much of the physical infrastructure has been rebuilt and is of improved quality relative to before the tsunami. Because the conflict has ended people have much more freedom of movement, which has been important for well-being. For a period there was extensive rebuilding, which generated many jobs, but much of this work has subsided. Meanwhile, many people who lost spouses have remarried. Aceh has experienced tremendous change over the past six years. Although for many people “normal” life has been largely restored, it doesn’t seem accurate to say that Aceh has returned to its pre-tsunami state—rather it is in a different state.

Bruce Potter: As a former employee of Mobil Exploration & Producing, which has one of the world’s largest gas fields in Aceh since 1978, I’m curious if the tsunami and recovery process has changed local perceptions of the multinational corporate interests in the region. Also, did the tsunami change perceptions or support for Aceh Merdeka or other movements supporting regional autonomy or independence?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: The combination of the peace agreement and cessation of the conflict, the inflow of assistance from national and international sources, and the direct election of a governor (a former Aceh Merdeka supporter) have changed the political/economic landscape of Aceh considerably. Our sense is that tensions involving multinational corporate interests have diminished, but there is likely considerable regional variation to this dynamic, and we expect it will continue to change over time.

Rajesh Kumar Rai: First round of DHS data for maldives has been released recently. They have captured the component of Tsunami. My question is how the effect of Tsunami differs from Maldives to Indonesia on elderly’s health?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Thank you for mentioning the DHS information on the Maldives. We have not seen any results from that survey. We have examined outcomes for older adults relative to younger adults. The older population was clearly disadvantaged with respect to survival with older women being the most likely to have died in the tsunami. For other outcomes the results are more nuanced. Mental health outcomes, and the recovery trajectory with respect to symptoms of post-traumatic stress, do not appear to be worse for older adults, and older adults may have been sheltered a bit from support received by living in camps. Many of the older men who lost a wife have remarried, but few of older women who lost a husband have remarried. Older men do not appear to reentered the labor market to the same extent as younger men, but the consumption patterns of older adults have recovered to the same degree as other demographic groups. To a large extent, our results suggest that the family has been an important safety net for older individuals.

Laurette Cucuzza: I would be interested to hear about whether there have been changes in gender norms or dynamics over the years at the individual or household level?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: It is very likely that there have been changes, as a result of a variety of different dynamics. For example, some women became head of household when their husbands died, and female-headed households were particularly likely to receive assistance. Young girls who lost both parents were more likely to marry (over the course of the study) than girls who had at least one surviving parent, and so earlier entry to marriage may affect dynamics. Likewise, boys who lost both parents were more likely to serve as household heads, changing their responsibilities and perhaps the gender dynamics in their household. Although we can speculate on the likelihood that circumstances have produced changes in gender norms and dynamics, it is difficult to pinpoint the precise nature of such changes in our survey data, particularly as we have little to no information about the operation of these dynamics before the tsunami

Cynthia Green: Is there a report or summary available of the main study findings?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: There is not an overall report, but we have published papers in the American Journal of Public Health (2008) on mental health and on service delivery (in the World Bank publication “Are you being served”) and would be happy to send you some additional working papers as they are finalized.

Godswill James: What is the implications of Tsunami experience for African countries, particularly Nigeria (the most populous countries in Africa)?
Elizabeth Frankenberg : There are several implications of our study. First, the family and community has played a critical role in the response to the tsunami. Starting right when the tsunami hit, we see evidence that the family was key for survival—a person was more likely to survive if there was a strong, prime-age adult in the family who could help during the onslaught of the water. Second, the resilience of children, prime-age and older adults in the face of the devastation of the tsunami is extremely impressive. Many people needed a helping hand—and the family and the community stepped up to help. However, there are people who needed more help and it is extremely important to identify those groups of people, and the assistance they need. These include, for example, communities that were wiped out or were cut off from the rest of Aceh because the roads were devastated; people who lost their families, especially children who lost one or both parents; those who lost their houses, arable land, boats or other sources of livelihoods. Support came in many forms. Camps were opened about three months after the tsunami. Schools were started in camps to help children adjust. Counseling was provided to those who sought it out. Re-building provided jobs, especially for prime age males. And funds were provided for reconstruction. There may be a role for organizations to be better prepared to identify needs, deploy the resources quickly and, importantly, track the impact of the resources that are deployed so that, going forward, we can build a better understanding of what is needed and what deployments are most effective. While many of the implications of our study apply to large-scale devastating events (such as earthquakes), we think these more general implications are likely to be applicable to broader class of settings, including, perhaps, disasters in Africa and possibly Nigeria.

Isa Baba: I would like to know the extent of psychological trauma suffered by the young victims of the catastrophe, and whether the longitudinal survey shows any significant adjustment on the part of those children?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: We have not completed an analysis of the degree of psychological trauma for the youngest victims, in part because in many cases their parents answered for them and it’s difficult to accurately assess psychological response from parental reports. We have analyzed young people’s time use in order to understand outcomes such as school enrollment and labor force participation. In the heavily damaged communities, many children missed some school after the tsunami, and indeed many schools were closed during this period. A key component of the relief effort was getting schools up and running again, and by the date of first interview (five to 17 months after the tsunami) school enrollment rates among respondents ages 8 to 18 did not appear to be depressed because of the tsunami. On the other hand, for girls who lost parents there was a tendency to increase time spent on household chores and work for pay. For boys we see the same impact on household chores. Over the longer term, girls who lost parents are more likely to leave school and to get married than girls who did not.

Nose: What did you find about the impact of aid reconstruction projects on families’ income or consumption? What have they been working for primary or secondary jobs since the tsunami, and can you look at their earning in your data? Has the income distribution changed over six years? Also, can you track the baseline family status in your longitudinal data?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Family income and consumption has returned to above pre-tsunami levels. We have looked at earnings data and we find that there has been little change in the overall income distribution but a shift away from older workers towards younger workers. We think this is a reflection of the impact of demand for manual labor in reconstruction which tends to favor younger men. We do track family status and the demographic composition of households from the baseline through each of the five waves of the survey.

Sushmita Mukherjee: What is the situation of single women or the children who were in the tsunami?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Children and women were more likely to be killed in the tsunami, in part because they had less strength with which to withstand the force of the water. Female headed households (which are mostly headed by unmarried women) were particularly likely to receive assistance in the aftermath of the tsunami. Some women who lost husbands remarried after the tsunami. Many children received scholarships after the tsunami, and this was especially true if they lost a parent. Most children who lost parents continue to live with family (either the surviving parent, or if both parents died, other family members). Some older children entered boarding schools.

Sushmita Mukherjee: What are the challenges you found that these people are still struggling with?
Elizabeth Frankenberg: Some people still experience psychological symptoms and grief for lost loved ones. It is unclear how the economy and job opportunities will evolve now that most of the reconstruction activities have ended.

CJ Bahnsen: Can you talk more about the history of this Aceh civil war? How bad was this conflict before tsunami versus the post-tsunami years? Thank you.
Elizabeth Frankenberg: I had not worked in Aceh prior to the tsunami, and so I can answer only in terms of other work I have read on the subject. There is a long history of conflict in Aceh, with flare ups at various points, including the years just before the tsunami. The conflict was accompanied by deaths, disappearances, and destruction of property. When our survey began, after the tsunami, the political security was still an issue, and many respondents and survey staff were nervous about security. In Sept 2005 a peace agreement was reached and the situation changed a great deal. Residents of Aceh had much more peace of mind as they went about their daily activities, and aid operations (and our survey) could occur with less disruption. Eventually Aceh held elections. Security issues became a much less pressing concern, which seemed to have many benefits.

The Impact of U.S. Antipoverty Programs

December 15, 2010

A wide range of antipoverty programs have been in place in the United States for decades, and millions of Americans depend on them. How effective have these programs been? Are they wasteful or efficient? Who do they reach? In this interview, Bill Butz, president of PRB, talks with Robert Moffitt, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, about the various types of U.S. antipoverty programs and policies and how the current recession will affect these programs. Moffitt’s research specialties include labor economics, econometrics, population economics, and the economics of antipoverty policies and programs. Moffitt is also currently the chief editor of the American Economic Review.

PRB Discuss Online: The Long-Term Effects of Childhood Poverty in the United States

October 28, 2010

Most poor children achieve less, exhibit more problem behaviors, and are less healthy than children raised in more-affluent families. Looking beyond these well-known correlations between poverty and negative outcomes in childhood, recent studies have assessed the effects of childhood poverty in the United States on later attainment and health. During a PRB Discuss Online, Greg Duncan, professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, and the current president of the Society for Research in Child Development, answered questions from participants about the effects of childhood poverty in the United States on later attainment and health.

Oct. 28, 2010, 1 p.m. (EDT)

Transcript of Questions and Answers

Richard Cincotta: Are there racial, or locational (rural-urban, ethnic vs. mixed-race neighborhood, high-rise vs. house, etc.) differences that show up in findings? I know that you may not have the data to fully answer that question—how about: Are there any interesting socio-environmental conditions that mediate your most general findings?
Greg Duncan: Good question. We checked to see if the relationship between early income and later productivity and health differed by gender or race. We found no significant differences at all. Recent research by Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig found evidence that generous housing vouchers helped most the education outcomes for poor children in Chicago’s worst neighborhoods. In our research, the story was about main effects of low income and not the interactions.

William O’Hare: I thought I read somewhere that must poor adults did not grow up in poverty. The odds of being a poor adult are higher but the number of non-poor children is so much larger that in shear numbers persons not growing up in poverty overwhelm the higher odds for poor children. If that is true, what does in mean about where we should focus our attention to prevent or limit adult poverty?
Greg Duncan: It is indeed true that most children who grow up experiencing poverty do not end up as poor adults. In fact, that study used the same data base—the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—as did our current set of studies. Our recent studies are based on the idea that poverty has selective effects on life chances—that the timing of poverty in childhood matters a lot and that poverty affects some kind of outcomes more than others. Abundant research has suggested that poverty early in childhood is most harmful, and that achievement is more sensitive to economic deprivation than is problem behavior (e.g., delinquency, teen births). Our recent studies are the first to use data that span a long enough time to link poverty as early as the prenatal year to adult outcomes as late as age 37. We again find that early poverty—perhaps even poverty during pregnancy and infancy—matters the most. But we also find that the early poverty impacts on labor market success may have as much to do with health as anything else. This complements recent epidemiological research showing that very stressful conditions during pregnancy and infancy can “program” the body in a way that leads to bad health outcomes later on.

J. Herman Blake: I have several interests and will put them in separate questions. What are the long-term effects of childhood poverty on oral health of adolescents and adults? Are there racial or ethnic variations? I am interested in both preventive approaches to oral health and later treatments for oral health problems.
Greg Duncan: Regrettably, we do not have data on oral health for adolescents and adults. Our adult health measures are, among others, self-reported weight and height, and diagnoses of arthritis, hypertension and diabetes. An interesting recent study of socioeconomic disparities and the oral health of children is: W. Thomas Boyce, Pamela K. Den Besten, Juliet Stamperdahl, Ling Zhan, Yebin Jiang, Nancy E. Adler, John D. Featherstone, Social inequalities in childhood dental caries: The convergent roles of stress, bacteria and disadvantage, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 71, Issue 9, November 2010, Pages 1644-1652.

Jane Cover: For which adult outcomes of child poverty is the evidence quite strong, and what are the areas or outcomes for which the evidence is more mixed, i.e., what do we know definitively (or as definitively as social science permits), and what is still up in the air?
Greg Duncan: Good question. The evidence linking low income to achievement in childhood is very solid, based on several different data sets and uses a number of experimental and longitudinal methods. But you ask about adulthood. Almost all of the existing childhood poverty/adult outcome studies are based on data that begins in adolescence. There are reasons to believe that poverty early in childhood is what matters the most, but almost no studies have followed individuals from conception to adulthood. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is one of them. Several Scandinavian countries have administrative data that could serve this purpose as well. There are several wonderful cohort studies in the UK but they did not measure income early in life. Our results are based on the PSID and we are in the process of replicating our results using data from the Norwegian data registers. Both provide terrific income histories across all of childhood but only limited information on adult outcomes. The PSID is the best here, with information on earnings, criminal behavior and health. The PSID is a public use data set, so we hope that people will attempt to replicate and extend what we have done.

Juanita Tamayo Lott: My research concern is along the lines of Bill O’Hare’s. Are long-term findings based on cross-sectional or longitudinal data and do they consider context such as economic depression, an era of affluence, civil or international war, natural calamaties, or persistent structural inequities? Does such research delineate intergenerational sets of populations by those who are born and raised poor and continue to be poor in adulthood; those who are poor as children but not as adults; and children who are not born or raised poor but become so as adults. What is their distribution? To what extent do researchers, service providers, and policy makers assume, even if unconsciously, that the poor will continue to be poor?
Greg Duncan: Our study, by the way, has been published, so you and other readers can see the details for yourselves. The reference is Duncan, G. J., Ziol-Guest, K. M. and Kalil, A. (2010), Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health. Child Development, 81: 306–325. Briefly, we are able to use 38-year longitudinal data on a national sample of U.S. children born between 1968 and 1975. The data provide a year by year accounting of family income from the prenatal year through age 15. Our analyses related adult outcomes to income very early in childhood (the prenatal year through age 5), but we controlled statistically for differences in income between ages 6 and 15, as well as a host of demographic characteristics at birth such as family structure and parental education and test scores. Since the data are from the U.S., there is a limited range of disruptive historical events and our results should not be generalized to other countries in different stages of development. We approached the research with as few preconceptions as possible. As author of the 1984 book Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty and the former principal investigator for the data used in the study, I am keenly aware of the surprising amount of economic mobility, both within and across generations, that has been documented with these and other data. The study’s website (http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Publications/) details many of the studies that provide answers to some of your other questions.

J. Herman Blake: How does your study of the long-term effects of childhood poverty help us understand the issues reflected in the question of a “culture of poverty?” Can we analyze this issue without becoming enmeshed in social controversy?
Greg Duncan: Culture of poverty arguments have cycled through poverty debates for a long time. Did you see the recent New York Times article about them? It was written by Patricia Cohen and appeared on October 18, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?emc=eta1). Our studies attempt to isolate the role of income rather than culture in affecting children’s life chances. In finding that income early in childhood seems to matter, we are not saying that it matters more than culture or parenting or neighborhood conditions. Income is important to understand because it is one of the few things that policy CAN change. Of course, cultural arguments are invoked every time some anti-poverty policy is being debated, but the work supports and welfare reforms of the 1990s proved that Americans are willing to spend tens of billions more dollars on helping to boost the incomes of poor families, provided that the help led to more labor market involvement and less welfare reliance. So that I think that it is possible to fashion helpful policies that are consistent with the values of most Americans. Even if, given the budget deficit, we can’t spend more money on low-income families, our research suggests that existing programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit but be more effective if families with young children received relatively more and families with older children received relatively less.

Okunrinmeta Olamide Adenike: What is the effect of Long-Term Childhood Poverty on the critical thinking and Intellectual performance of affected children?
Greg Duncan: Evidence from a number of studies suggests that increasing the family incomes of poor families will lead to gains in young children’s cognitive and academic performance. Many correlational studies have shown that. But so too did the Negative Income Tax experiment, which assigned families at random to get higher incomes or not. Quasi-experimental studies of the mid-1990s expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit found links to higher child test scores, as did a study of Canada’s expansion of its child benefits. We know less about why. Several studies point to what money can buy in terms of enriching children’s early learning experiences, both inside the home (e.g., more books) and outside (e.g., better-quality child care).

Allan Hill: Are there intervention studies that reducing household poverty improves childhood and post-childhood outcomes net of other changes (e.g. secular health improvements)? Are there panel or intervention studies in LDCs that address this question?
Greg Duncan: The income-based intervention studies (some random assignment and some strong quasi-experimental design) compare treatment and control groups in the same cohort, so secular changes are affecting both groups equally. In LDCs there are a number of conditional cash transfer programs with positive results. Here again treatment and control groups in the same cohort are being compared.

Lisa: There is much research available on the impact of long-term poverty,or generational poverty, on outcomes for children. What, if any, are the differences in outcomes for children of sudden, possibly shorter-term poverty for children? I would like to be able to talk about the impact of poverty caused by the current economic downturn on children in some of our publications coming out in the next year or two.
Greg Duncan: There haven’t been good studies of very short term (several months to one or two years) poverty spells. If the spells are several years in duration, and occur during early childhood, then our results would indicate that there are likely negative impacts. There is a separate literature on the impact of unemployment on children. Ariel Kalil at the University of Chicago, who was a coauthor on my poverty studies, has contributed to this literature and knows it well.

Meskerem Bekele, Ethiopia: It is good to discuss with a professional like you. And I want to thank PRB for their facilitation. The issue is interesting and surprising to me. I do not think like this about poverty before. . . .to me, childhood poverty makes someone strong. Even most of our country’s “successful” persons talk about themselves likes this. When the research shows that “…childhood poverty have a substantial negative association with adult earnings, work hours, and certain health conditions…”—what do you mean by “work hours”?
Greg Duncan: These sessions are enjoyable for us as well. Families experience a surprising amount of income fluctuation from one year to the next. Our research indicates that timing is everything—if it occurs early in childhood then it is likely to be harmful. Poverty spells at other times, perhaps because families are better able to cope with them, appear to have benign impacts. Our look at work hours used information on the children’s report of their adult work hours between ages 25 and 37. We average annual work hours over that time and tried to see if they were sensitive to early spells of poverty. And, yes, they appeared to be.

Usha Natampalli: Do children who face multiple deprivation owing to poverty and hunger have shorter life expectations?
Greg Duncan: We know that there are strong simple associations between family background and longevity—individuals raised in lower socioeconomic status families do not live as long as individuals raised in more affluent families. Our study took a more detailed look at the timing of poverty in childhood and found that early childhood was the most sensitive. We could only follow the children into their 30s so we couldn’t observe mortality. But with early poverty linked to obesity and hypertension, the chances are that these effect might well carry over into life expectancy.

Luis Uribe: This kind of problems in the adulthood-related to child poverty, affect in the same way to the Latino community?
Greg Duncan: The data we used followed children born in the United States between 1968 and 1975, so there were very few Latinos in the sample. We did not observe differences in poverty effects between Blacks and Whites, but we can’t say if Latinos are affected in the same way. As you may know, other studies have indicated that Latinos seem to have better health than their income levels would lead us to expect.

J Kishore: Dear Greg Duncan, it is well known that poverty is causing long term effects of childhood poverty. In India we say it is caste which is linked with poverty and such poor children belong to native castes remain poor performers in every field. International bodies are not recognizing caste in India a problem to a significant amount of children suffering from malnutrition and subsequent poor skill development. What will you suggest in such situation?
Greg Duncan: My research is US based, and I know little about the Indian context. A good source of information about ideas for developing countries is the MIT Poverty Action Lab: http://www.povertyactionlab.org.

Beth Mattingly: What are the factors that promote resiliency among children exposed to poverty at a very young age? How much do these vary by timing and duration of childhood poverty?
Greg Duncan: Our study was focused on income itself, and we found that poverty in the very early years was the most likely to scar later development. Low income later in childhood mattered much less. So the “timing” issue as it relates to the age of the child appears to be very important. As to promoting resilience, I can think of both parent and child factors. Ensuring that the pregnancy and the child’s early years are not severely stressed involved adequate prenatal care and, after the birth, genuine choice over when the mother returns to the labor force. Workplace leave policies and state welfare programs can work against the needed degree of choice. As to child-based factors, I would put most of my money into early education programs, since a child starting school ready to learn has the greatest chance of later academic successes.

Mil Duncan: What do we know about the individual characteristics, family circumstances and neighborhood conditions of those who escape poverty?
Greg Duncan: Hi Mil. Good (and tough) questions! Despite our focus on intergenerational poverty, research does show that most children who grow up poor or in welfare dependent households are not themselves persistently poor or welfare dependent when they become adults. That said, there is certainly a substantial correlation between the economic standing of parents and grown children. In looking for characteristics that matter the most for escaping, the child’s completed schooling level is by far the most important, with each additional year of education producing close to a 10% increase in lifetime earnings. Evidence is mounting that neighborhood conditions matter much less than family conditions—once you account for the powerful role parent education plays and the selective role that income appears to play, it is hard to see many neighborhood effects. And recent mobility experiments have confirmed that most child outcomes (test scores, for example) fail to improve when children move with their families from very poor to somewhat more affluent neighborhoods.

Dr. Josephine Alumanah: How can the parents/Guardians be empowered? How can poverty be eradicated? Prevention is better than cure, don’t we think?
Greg Duncan: The answer to these questions would fill volumes! My research is US-based, where income supports are closely tied to work, and public education is available to all. If I were to pick one intervention it would be education—beginning in the preschool years with a high-quality, curriculum-based program, and continuing through college. As you probably know, the quality of education has declined with the recession and even before the recession the US had fallen behind many countries in its production of college graduates. This is most worrisome. As to parent empowerment, I spent several years evaluating a highly effective effective work-support program in Milwaukee called New Hope. It offered a bundle of supports—earnings supplements, childcare subsidies, health insurance subsidies and a temporary community service job—for adults willing to commit to full time work. A random-assignment evaluation showed that the children in New Hope families—particularly the boys—did much better than their control-group counterparts. The MDRC.org website documents the program and its impacts (http://www.mdrc.org/project_8_30.html), as does the book Higher Ground: New Hope for Low Income Families and Their Children (http://www.newhopebook.com).

Diana Lavery: Hi Dr. Duncan – I recently read a few studies about the positive effects of social networks on health and well-being. I’m wondering if there were differences in children who grow up in poverty and have strong social networks (such as more “collective” communities, e.g. Hispanic and Asian) vs. children who grow up in poverty and have weak social networks (such as more “individualistic” communities, e.g. white and black). I know that there weren’t statistically significant racial differences in your analysis, but were there differences by strength of social networks? If there were, perhaps this would be useful when considering types of preventative programs.
Greg Duncan: Great question. There is a body of research on the role of neighborhood “collective efficacy”—the degree to which neighbors look out for one another—that is relevant. Rob Sampson, Steve Raudenbush and Tony Earls published a paper in Science that linked collective efficacy to child outcomes (Science 15 August 1997: Vol. 277. no. 5328, pp. 918 – 924). On the other hand, in the mobility experiment I mentioned to Mil Duncan, moving to more affluent neighborhoods increased collective efficacy but did not improve most child outcomes. The website http://www.nber.org/mtopublic has collected all of the studies associated with this experiment. Some research studies on child outcomes find that, relative to whites and controlling for family circumstances, Asian children do better, but it is hard to infer what it might be about Asian communities or families that makes the difference.

Diana Lavery: Since early childhood poverty is associated with lower health and lower productivity in adulthood, what do you think the best intervention would be to assist children in poverty today? Should interventions be more education oriented, more health/nutrition oriented, or something else?
Greg Duncan: The research I summarized concerned income-based poverty in the United States (Duncan, G. J., Ziol-Guest, K. M. and Kalil, A. (2010), Early-Childhood Poverty and Adult Attainment, Behavior, and Health. Child Development, 81: 306–325). There are several U.S. programs that have the potential for transferring more income to low-income families with young children—the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit are two prominent examples. Each could be geared to pay relative larger benefits to families with younger children and less to families with older children. Other direct service programs such as Early Childhood Education (e.g., pre-kindergarten) programs could help as well. Whatever we choose, we should support programs with proven track records of providing more benefits than costs.

Recession and Recovery: How Are Americans Affected?

September 15, 2010

View webcast (Time: 48 minutes)

On July 12, 2010, the Population Association of America (PAA), in cooperation with Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Charles Schumer, and Reps. Vern Ehlers, Rush Holt, Carolyn Maloney, and Lucille Roybal-Allard, sponsored a presentation at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., on recession, recovery, and families in the United States. PRB was one of the co-sponsors.

Americans are facing the greatest economic challenges since the Great Depression. In June 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent, with 14.6 million people unemployed. The Census Bureau reported that real median household income has declined, and that in 2008, the nation’s poverty rate was 13.2 percent, up from 12.5 percent in 2007. Furthermore, a record 2.8 million properties had a mortgage in foreclosure.

Although efforts to jumpstart the economy have mainly focused on helping the economic sector, it is also important to examine the plight of families and individuals, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Recent data are able to document the effects of the recession and, in some cases, speculate on what the longer-term consequences of recession and recovery could be, based on longitudinal surveys conducted by demographers at PAA.

Matthew Stagner of the University of Chicago opened the session. Speakers then covered data from surveys on three population groups, ranging from older Americans to children. Michael Hurd, director of the Center for the Study of Aging at the RAND Corporation, discussed the older population, using data from the Health and Retirement Study. Kathleen Mullan Harris of the University of North Carolina talked about young adults, using data from the Adolescent Survey of Health. Greg Duncan of the University of California–Irvine presented results on the long-term impact on children, using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics.

Presentations

Matthew Stagner, University of Chicago, “Introduction” (Time: 0:00 – 6:00)

Michael Hurd, RAND Corporation, “Impact of the Recession on Older Americans” (Time: 6:00 – 21:10)

Kathleen Mullan Harris, University of North Carolina, “Impact of the Recession on Young Adults” (Time: 21:11 – 33:20)

Greg Duncan, University of California–Irvine, “Long Reach of Early Childhood Poverty on Children” (Time: 33:22 – 48:00)

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Transcript of Questions and Answers

Transcript of Questions and Answers

Transcript of Questions and Answers

Transcript of Questions and Answers

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