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Household structure and child education in Cambodia

parents in particular (Safman, 2003).
In the next section, we briefly review this growing literature, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. We then describe
recent demographic trends in Cambodia and the country’s educational system. From this review and assessment of the
current situation in Cambodia, we derive hypotheses about the direction and size of the effects of not residing with a
biological parent, as well as the effects of living in a multi-generational household. The subsequent section describes
the data and methods used to test these hypotheses. The penultimate section describes our results. As discussed in the
final section, they appear fairly consistent overall with the body of research conducted in high-income Nations, which,
as discussed below, has not always been the case in medium- and low-income Nations. However, as did a few previous
studies in these settings, we note some “anomalies” with respect to children residing with neither of their biological
parents.
1.1 Literature Review

A central concern of the expansive literature on the effects of growing up with a single biological parent is the endogeneity
of parents’ living-arrangement decisions. Parents who have a child outside of marriage and those who divorce can be
expected to differ from those who remain married on many characteristics. Some of those may very well affect their
child’s wellbeing regardless of whether parents are married or not. Consequently, research on these effects in Western
societies has become increasingly sophisticated in accounting for differences between households with children and both
of their biological parents vs. other types of households in which children live. Nonetheless, the overall conclusion seems
to stand that these differences, economic in particular, account for some—maybe half—but not all of the differences in
various wellbeing indicators between children living with both of their biological parents and those who do not (among
many reviews of this large literature, see, for instance, McLanahan, Tach and Schneider, 2013).
A strain of comparative work across Western societies has also documented institutional effects on how children fare
across different living arrangements (Cooke and Baxter, 2010). Large international survey programs such as the Trends
in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
have provided opportunities for cross-national research on these effects with respect to child educational performance.
These studies have found that, in all countries, the average educational performance of children who live with both
of their biological parents is higher than the average educational performance of those who do not—a typical pattern
referred to as the “educational gradient” thereafter. Within countries, this educational gradient tends to increase slightly
with age, but its magnitude varies markedly between countries. In multiple studies, gradients were found to be larger in
the U.S.A. than in any other country included in the analyses, for instance, and to become almost negligible in countries
with the most generous welfare provisions. The magnitude of the gradients, typically adjusted for parental characteristics,
is difficult to compare across studies that may use different parental characteristics as control variables. Using data on
TIMSS “population1” students (centered on 9 year-olds), the unadjusted U.S. gradients were estimated to amount to 20 to
29 points in Math and 17 to 33 points in Sciences (Pong, Dronkers and Hampden-Thompson, 2003). (In both TIMSS and
PISA surveys, achievement scores are “curved” so that a standard deviation (SD) is close to 100 points). For “population-2
students” (centered on 13 year-olds), researchers reported U.S. unadjusted gradients equivalent to 35 points in Math and
36 points in Sciences again analyzing TIMSS data (Heuveline, Yang and Timberlake, 2010). Using PISA data on 15 year-
old students, unadjusted gradients in the U.S.A. have been estimated to range from 36 to 50 points in reading, 42 to 53
points in Math, and 37 points in Science (Garib, Martin Garcia and Dronkers, 2007; Hampden-Thomson, 2013; Marks,
2006).
In a systematic analysis of TIMSS data in non-Western societies, Schiller, Khmelkov and Wang, (2004) find that
educational gradients are related to a country’s Gross Domestic Product, with the poorest countries exhibiting the smallest
effects of living arrangements on children’s education. Several country-specific analyses have replicated results from high-
income countries regarding the advantage of children living with both parents (e.g., most recently, Chae, 2016). Other
studies have obtained mixed results or even produced findings to the contrary. Evidence of a reversed gradient indicates
that the cultural context matters with respect to, for instance, whether and to which extent some living arrangements are
stigmatized, and which children may be selected into particular living arrangements. Without delving into this country-
specific literature (see DeRose, Corcuera Garcia, Salazar et al., 2014 for a comprehensive review), we should note two
issues that have received more attention in non-Western than in Western countries. The first one concerns the different
effects associated with the different pathways into residing with only one or no biological parent. In the West, researchers
may have paid attention to the differences between non-marital childbearing and divorce, or more rarely, between divorce
and widowhood in the West (e.g., Biblarz and Gottainer, 2000). In many low- and medium-income countries, parental
mortality remains high (Beegle, De Weerdt and Dercon, 2009; Birdthistle, Floyd, Nyagadza et al., 2009; Case and
Ardington, 2006; Evans and Miguel, 2007; Gertler, Levine and Ames, 2004) and parental migration is becoming more

2 International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2