Publication: COVID-19 School Closures, Learning Losses and Intergenerational Mobility
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Date
2023-03-28
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2023-03-28
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The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility.
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“Azevedo, João Pedro; Cojocaru, Alexandru; Talledo, Veronica Montalva; Narayan, Ambar. 2023. COVID-19 School Closures, Learning Losses and Intergenerational Mobility. Policy Research Working Papers; 10381. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/39607 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication COVID-19 and Economic Inequality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01)This paper examines the short-term implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for inequality in developing countries. The analysis takes advantage of high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank to assess the distributional impacts of the pandemic through the channels of job and income losses, food insecurity, and children’s education in the early days of the pandemic and subsequent period of economic recovery leading up to early 2021. It also introduces a methodology for estimating changes in income inequality due to the pandemic by combining data from phone surveys, pre-pandemic household surveys, and macroeconomic projections of sectoral growth rates. The paper finds that the pandemic had dis-equalizing impacts both across and within countries. Even under the assumption of distribution-neutral impacts within countries, the projected income losses are estimated to be higher in the bottom half of the global income distribution. Within countries, disadvantaged groups were more likely to have experienced work and income losses initially and are recovering more slowly. Inequality simulations suggest an increase in the Gini index for 29 of 34 countries in the sample, with an average increase of about 1 percent. Although these short-term impacts on inequality appear to be small, they suggest that projections of global poverty and inequality impacts of COVID-19 under the assumption of distribution-neutral changes within countries are likely to underestimate actual impacts. Finally, the paper argues that the overall inequality impacts of COVID-19 could be larger over the medium-to-long term on account of a slow and uneven recovery in many developing countries, and disparities in learning losses during pandemic-related school closures, which will likely have long-lasting effects on inequality of opportunity and social mobility.Publication COVID-19 and Inequality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06)The restrictions on mobility and economic activity that were put in place to mitigate the health impacts of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic have had an unequal impact both across and within countries, with vulnerable populations within developing countries being affected disproportionately. An important concern is that the recovery may be similarly inequitable. Across the 17 developing countries in our sample, where policies became more conducive to mobility and economic activity, we indeed observe a partial recovery of employment and incomes in most countries, as well as improvements in food security. Although job recovery and lower policy stringency were accompanied by an overall fall in the share of the food-insecure population from 13 percent to 9 percent, those living in rural areas witnessed slower declines in food insecurity. However, the recovery was not only incomplete, but also uneven within countries. In particular, the recovery in employment among those who suffered larger initial shocks - - women, non-college-educated, and urban workers - - was not sufficient to significantly reduce the initial disparities in losses. By August-September, female employment had only recovered 30 percent of what was lost between pre-pandemic and May-June (versus 49 percent for men). Finally, more recent data for a smaller number of countries up to January 2021 indicates that while food security continued improving in these countries, recovery in employment appears to have stalled, while the disparities by gender and education persisted.Publication Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)School closures due to COVID-19 have left more than a billion students out of school. This paper presents the results of simulations considering three, five and seven months of school closure and different levels of mitigation effectiveness resulting in optimistic, intermediate and pessimistic global scenarios. Using data on 157 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall. COVID-19 could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 0.9 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.9 years to between 7.0 and 7.6 years. Close to 7 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $355, $872, or $1,408 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,472 and $25,680 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, like girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by the school closures. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. The world could thus face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor and be unable to meet the goal by 2030 unless drastic remedial action is taken.Publication Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-03-17)This paper presents simulations of the potential effect of COVID-19-related school closures on schooling and learning outcomes. It considers four scenarios—varying in both the duration of school closures and the effectiveness of any mitigation strategies being deployed by governments. Using data on 174 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall substantially. School closures could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 1.1 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.8 years to between 6.7 and 7.5 years. Close to 11 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, such as girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by school closures. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $366 to $1,776 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,680 and $32,397 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. In the pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios, cumulative losses could add up to between $16 and $20 trillion in present value terms. Unless drastic remedial action is taken, the world could face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor by 2030.Publication Learning Losses during COVID-19(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10)This paper presents updated simulation results of the potential effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning outcomes globally. The simulation, which updates and extends prior work by Azevedo, Hasan et al. (2021) and Azevedo (2020), examines potential learning losses as the pandemic moves into the third year. Beyond reflecting the longer duration of the crisis, the paper extends prior work by using country-specific observed school closure information, accounts for the partial reopening of some education systems, updates the baseline Learning Poverty estimates to reflect its best estimate to date just before the pandemic (circa 2019), and uses updated June 2021 macroeconomic projections to reflect the economic magnitude of the crisis. The analysis finds that the overall learning levels are likely to fall substantially around the world. Under an “intermediate” scenario, school closures could potentially increase the share of children in Learning Poverty in low- and middle-income countries by 13 percentage points, to 70 percent. Globally, learning adjusted years of schooling could fall by 1.1 years, and the share of youth below minimum proficiency on the Programme for International Student Assessment could rise by 12.3 percentage points. Furthermore, school shutdowns could generate lifetime earning losses of $21 trillion. These results imply that decisive action is needed to recover and accelerate learning.
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