Short- and Long-Term Impact of Violence on Education: The Case of Timor Leste

Abstract

Citation: Justino, P.; Leone, M. and Salardi, P. (2014) Short-and Long-Term Impact of Violence on Education: The Case of Timor Leste, The World Bank Economic Review 28.2: 320-353 Official URL: http://wber.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/2/320.abstract More details/abstract: This paper analyzes the impact of the wave of violence that occurred in Timor Leste in 1999 on education outcomes. We examine the short-term impact of the violence on school attendance in 2001 and its longer-term impact on primary school completion of the same cohorts of children observed again in 2007. We compare the educational impact of the 1999 violence with the impact of other periods of high-intensity violence during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation. The short-term effects of the conflict are mixed. In the longer term, we find evidence of a substantial loss of human capital among boys in Timor Leste who were exposed to peaks of violence during the 25-year long conflict. The evidence suggests that this result may be due to household trade offs between education and economic welfare.

The impact of refugee experiences on education: evidence from Burundi

“…This evidence mostly refers to internal displacement and suggests that these experiences have major negative consequences for schooling outcomes. For instance, Justino et al (2014) estimated that, in Timor Leste, experiencing displacement decreased school attendance by 8.5 percentage points. For Burundi, Verwimp and Van Bavel (2014) estimated that the probability of completing primary schooling declined by 2 percentage points for every year spent in a camp.…”

“…One important aspect that displacement experiences can affect is access to education. Several studies suggest that forced displacement is one of the key channels through which conflict can have a detrimental impact on schooling outcomes (Chamarbagwala and Moran 2011;Justino et al 2014;Verwimp and Van Bavel 2014). Most studies have, however, focused on internally displaced persons (IDPs) while there is scarce evidence on the impact of forced displacement on the education of refugees.…”

The impact of extreme weather events on education

“…Overall, our identification strategy follows studies that investigate the impact of shocks on education -but which have focused on different types of shocks, such as a locust invasion in Mali (De Vreyer, Guilbert and Mesple-Somps 2015), the 1999 conflict in Timor Leste (Justino et al 2014), the civil war in Tajikistan (Shemyakina 2011), the Maoist insurgency in Nepal (Valente 2014), the Peruvian internal conflict (León 2012), and the civil war in Burundi (Verwimp and Van Bavel 2014).…”

“…Since the 1950s, the NSO implements an annual livestock census in mid-December, collecting information on the total stock and losses of adult animals. Yearly advantage that it is less prone to measurement errors than the continuous shock measure (Justino, Leone and Salardi 2014;León 2012). We define a binary variable that takes the value one if the dzud intensity in a given district (or household) is above the median plus one standard deviation of the distribution.…”

Hard to Forget: The Long-Lasting Impact of War on Mental Health

“…The existing literature shows that violent conflict almost always results in reductions in educational access and attainment (Alderman, Hoddinott, and Kinsey 2006;Akresh and de Walque 2008;Swee, 2013;Justino, Leone and Salardi 2014). Relatively minor shocks to educational access during childhood can lead to significant and long-lasting detrimental effects on individ- Comparatively much less evidence exists on the mental health effects of conflict.…”