The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity: Declining Fertility and Rising Investment in Private Tutoring in Vietnam

Hai-Anh H. Dang, World Bank Group
Halsey F. Rogers, World Bank Group

Despite the recent considerable study of the quality-quantity tradeoff, there has been little research so far on the correlation between household size and household educational investment in their children in the form of expenditures for private tutoring (and more broadly private schooling). Private tutoring merits attention for several reasons. First, private tutoring expenditures may be a good measure of a household’s decision to invest voluntarily in their children’s human capital. Second, private tutoring is widespread in many countries, and it can improve students’ academic performance (Bray and Kwok, 2003; Dang and Rogers, 2008). Third, there has been considerable debate about tutoring among policy-makers in some countries (Bray, 2003). This paper investigates the quality-quantity tradeoff in terms of household size and household spending on private tutoring. We also collected data on a large set of variables that could be used as instruments for family size, which are usually used scatteringly in the literature.