Children’s skill formation in less developed countries – The impact of sports participation

Previous research suggests that sports club participation of children in developed countries positively influences the children’s well-being, health as well as human and social capital. We use panel data of a cohort of 1,579 children in Ethiopia and Peru to test these relationships in less developed countries where access to work might be only to manual labor, access to education is more limited and daily-survival activities demand high physical energy. By exploiting the panel structure of our data in a specific way, we suggest that the effects flexibly estimated by propensity score matching are close to having a causal interpretation. The findings suggest that the impact of programs, such as those provided in sport, can have positive developmental impacts for children, for example, on human and social capital, but that the results vary by context.