Early Childhood Development in the Philippines: Family Background-Service Provider Interactions

Elizabeth King, World Bank Group
Jere Behrman, University of Pennsylvania
Judith B. Borja, University of San Carlos
Sharon J. Ghuman, University of Pennsylvania
Socorro Gultiano, University of San Carlos

Increasing resources are devoted to early childhood development (ECD) programs in developing countries. But little is known about the effects of these programs. One under-researched question is: are interactions between family background and ECD programs important? Are there gross complementarities (substitutions) such that “better” family background interacts positively (negatively) with ECD services? We examine these questions using rich new data that we collected from the Philippines that include indicators of (1) ECD for 12,000+ Filipino pre-school children (anthropometrics, health status, illness history, motor and cognitive development) (2) family background (parental schooling and anthropometrics, household assets) and (3) local ECD providers (presence of various facilities). We use principal components to summarize the substantial information for these three sets of variables. In the multivariate relations, we explore robustness of estimates to controls for unobserved community and family background characteristics that might relate to ECD and be correlated with the interaction terms.