Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS) conducted in 1987/88 and
1998/99, this thesis examines two thematic areas of non-monetary returns to
education in Ghana. One of the primary aims is to find the differences in the effects
of education over the decade (1987/88–1998/99), using standard and nonstandard
econometric analysis. In addition, the later survey year serves as a
robustness check on the first.
The first theme examines health status; measured as illness and its duration, as
well as the use of anthropometric indicators. The study finds that parental
education is positively associated with child’s reported illness and its duration.
Further verification of this outcome using an instrumental variable (2SLS)
approach that assumes possible endogeneity of parental education supports the
results relating to maternal education in both survey years. In contrast, paternal
primary education tends to reduce children’s reported illness; but this is only
statistically significant in GLSS 1. These outcomes, although perverse are not
uncommon in developing countries, and may be the result of systematic reporting
bias. The analysis also reveals inconsistent results regarding adults’ health status
between the two survey years. For example, we find that illness and its duration
increase with personal education in GLSS 1, but the converse is true in GLSS 4,
ceteris paribus. The mixed results of this study imply that the relationship
between education and health status varies across health measures, and probably
over time. Hence caution should be exercised before broad conclusions are drawn
and policies made regarding these two vital socioeconomic indicators (education
and health).
The last theme analyses fertility in both structural and reduced form functions.
The structural function involves a two-stage process. The first stage estimates the
effect of education on three proximate determinants of fertility - the duration of
breastfeeding, contraceptive use and age at cohabitation. The second stage
subsequently models the fertility function by estimating three measures: the
probability of having at least one birth; the unconditional number of births; and
the number of births conditional on one having occurred, using the predicted
values of the proximate determinants as inputs similar to the conventional
production function. The reduced form fertility model estimates the impact of
women’s education on the number of live births. The findings are that (1)
education increases the use of contraception, delays age at cohabitation and
shortens the duration of breastfeeding, as anticipated; (2) contraception and age
at cohabitation subsequently tend to reduce the overall number of live births,
though we observe an ambiguous outcome regarding breastfeeding; (3)
education, in a fuller and direct way, also shows a strong negative association with
fertility in both surveys; and finally (4) fertility appears to have declined over the
period studied. We also find a structural shift in respect of the influence of
women’s education from post-primary to primary level on fertility, ceteris
paribus.