Conflict, Educational Attainment, and Structural Transformation: La Violencia in Colombia

Abstract

We examine the long-term impact of violence on educational attainment, with evidence from Colombia's La Violencia. Individuals exposed to violence during, and especially before, their schooling years experience a significant and economically meaningful decrease in years of schooling. This impact has consequences beyond human capital accumulation: exposed cohorts engage in activities with less human capital content. Violence thus influenced aggregate development -particularly the process of structural transformation, in which some sectors gain prominence as income increases. The effects result not so much from the direct destruction of physical infrastructure, but from affected households' responses to the hardships of conflict.

Heterogeneous effects of violence on student achievement: Evidence from Colombia

“…The negative effect of the Colombian armed conflict on education attainment is well documented in the literature (e.g., Fergusson et al, 2019;Rodriguez & Sanchez, 2012;Wharton & Uwaifo Oyelere, 2011); however, evidence about its negative effect on educational achievement is still inconclusive. Some studies have documented the negative effect of the conflict on test scores using instrumental variables (G omez Soler, 2016;Munevar-Meneses et al, 2019), while others have documented average test score improvements in the most violent areas of the F I G U R E 2 Map of FARC Municipalities before the Peace Agreement.…”

“…Existing evidence explores some of the mechanisms that explain the negative effect of violence on education in the case of the Colombian conflict. Some of these mechanisms are the reduction of public expenditure on education-to compensate for higher policing expenses-violent acts as direct obstacles for school attendance, and the death of family members that forces children to abandon school at an early age (Fergusson et al, 2019). Other mechanisms are associated with poverty traps such as the loss of assets (Ibáñez & Moya, 2010), loss of productive lands, human displacement and human capital depreciation in the transition from rural to urban areas (Ibáñez, 2008).…”

Ethnic inequality and forced displacement

“…We measure inequalities in the dimension of education for the pragmatic reason that we do not have pre-conflict information on income or wealth. One concern about this graph might be the directionality of the relationship between conflict and education [25]. As we are not aware of any research demonstrating a response of education to the expectation of future conflict, we think that completed education pre-conflict might not suffer from simultaneity bias.…”

“…The distance to the Uzbek border, decreased the cost of flight for ethnic Uzbeks across the border and shaped socioeconomic opportunities for ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz differently in the past. Moreover, we control for varying sets of covariates shown to be important in conflict settings such as population, birthplace, unemployment [31], urban [32], major manufacturing plants [25] and landownership [33].…”

Unveiling the Causal Mechanisms Within Multidimensional Poverty

“…In the case of living standard indicators, some of these studies have used instrumental variables to estimate negative outcomes in terms of human displacement and the loss of assets (Ibáñez & Moya 2006, 2010; Ibáñez, 2008). In the case of education, some of these studies have used OLS with fixed effects and difference-in-difference regressions to estimate a lower degree of educational attainment in conflict zones (Wharton & Uwaifo Oyelere, 2011), a decrease in public expenditure on education (to compensate for higher policing expenses), physical obstacles to attending schools, and the death of family members forcing children to abandon school at an early age (Fergusson et al, 2020). This paper provides new evidence on the ways in which violence can affect multidimensional poverty in Colombia.…”