Topic Defence Seminar on "Childhood Shocks and Human Capital Development of the Child"

​Childhood is a delicate and critical stage of life and the quality of care given to a child at this stage, which typical takes the form of investment in medical services and facilities has been shown to be a key determinant of a child's overall life outcomes, and by extension, an indication of a nation's progress. Medical sciences have shown that by age four, half of a person's intelligence tends to have been fully developed and thus any form of health shocks or investments that the child faces around this period is predicted to have long lasting effects on the child's intellectual capacity, his social behavior, personality and overall development. The concerns of the international organization such as United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) is the fact that most developing countries of the world in Africa, Asia and Latin America are characterized by poor or absence of medical facilities and services, national health insurance, public education and old-age pensions. This implies that children from these parts of the world are the most vulnerable to the issue of childhood shocks which has dire implications in their life outcomes over time. There has been several positions held by researcher over this issue; whilst a number of researchers consider the linkage between childhood health and life outcomes to be direct, others claim that this relationship is either indirect or not clear-cut. The foregoing is the key motivation for this study, which uses a panel data from Young Lives Survey to empirically understand the effect of childhood shocks on the human capital development of the child and the nature of this relationship in two developing countries of interest which are Ethiopia and Vietnam. Furthermore, the study seeks to consider the relationship between the age at which the children covered in the data set experienced some sort of health shock in their childhood, their gender, birth-order and parent's socioeconomic status at that stage and their later outcomes. Understanding the channel through which childhood shocks affect later outcomes and how other groups in the population are affected in the presence of such shocks is important and informative for policy formulation towards medical facilities and services at least for children.