Crises and Educational Prioritization

Crises such as armed conflicts and natural disasters usually have harmful effects on children’s education. However, they may also make the public more aware of the importance of education. During times of crisis, more people may realize that a good education helps to maintain or regain employment and earnings. Consequently, crises may raise the public’s educational prioritization. To test this hypothesis, the paper uses data on six types of crisis covering 50 countries. The types of crisis studied are natural disasters, internal and external conflicts as well as unemployment, inflation and banking crises. The regression results show that each type of crisis is associated with higher educational prioritization, corroborating the hypothesis. Except for unemployment crises, the magnitude of the estimated effects is substantial. The paper combines individual-level data from the World Values Survey with country-level data on crises and relevant national characteristics.