Retard de scolarisation au Banglash : une analyse économétrique.

This paper attempts to understand why children often delay school enrolment despite the prediction of human capital theory that schooling should begin at the earliest possible age. We explore different explanations of delayed enrolment but focus particularly on the effect of child health on the timing of human capital investment and on ultimate attainment. We improve on past studies in a number of ways mainly by incorporating into our analysis the endogenous nature of child health, the discrete nature of dependent variable and mainly by correcting for the problem of censoring variables. Using the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey conducted in Bangladesh (1996), our results strongly suggest that early childhood malnutrition is the cause of delayed enrolment. Our estimation results suggest that the cost of three years average delayed enrolment is about 23 % of individual life-time wealth.