Abstract

SummaryThe Timor Leste secession conflict lasted for 25 years. Its last wave of violence in 1999, following the withdrawal of Indonesian troops, generated massive displacement and destruction with widespread consequences for the economic and social development of the country. This paper analyses the impact of the conflict on the level and access to education of boys and girls in Timor Leste. We examine the short‐term impact of the 1999 violence on school attendance and grade deficit rates in 2001, and the longer‐term impact of the conflict on primary school completion of cohorts of children observed in 2007. We compare also the educational impact of the 1999 wave of 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 a strong negative impact of the conflict on primary school completion among boys of school age exposed to peaks of violence during the 25‐year long conflict. The effect is stronger for boys attending the last three grades of primary school. This result shows a substantial loss of human capital among young males in Timor Leste since the early 1970s, resulting from household investment trade‐offs between education and economic survival.

Highlights

  • Violent conflict is one of the most important development challenges facing the world today

  • We focus on the analysis of the impact of 25 years of violent conflict in Timor Leste on several educational outcomes among cohorts of boys and girls of primary school age affected by the violence

  • We analysed the impact of peaks of violence in the 1970s and 1980s on schooling outcomes in 2007, as well as the overall impact of the conflict

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Summary

Summary

The Timor Leste secession conflict lasted for 25 years. Its last wave of violence in 1999, following the withdrawal of Indonesian troops, generated massive displacement and destruction with widespread consequences for the economic and social development of the country. The effect is stronger for boys attending the last three grades of primary school This result shows a substantial loss of human capital among young males in Timor Leste since the early 1970s, resulting from household investment trade-offs between education and economic survival. Marinella Leone is a DPhil student in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex Her main research interests are development economics and applied microeconometrics, in particular child labour, education and the economic impact of conflicts. Paola Salardi is a DPhil student in the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex Her primary research interests are in labour economics and applied microeconometrics, while she is currently working in the field of the economics of conflict. Impact of 1999 violence on grade deficit in 2001, controlling for migration

Introduction
Literature review
A brief history of Timor Leste
Conflict variation across time and space
The education sector in Timor Leste
Identification strategy and data description
Identification strategy: the impact of violence on school attendance in 2001
Primary school attendance and grade deficit rates in 2001
Empirical strategy
Potential biases and identification concerns
The educational impact of the 1999 wave of violence
Empirical strategy and descriptive statistics
Potential sample biases and identification concerns
School attendance in 2001
School completion in 2007
Robustness checks
Civil war exposure in 2006
Migration biases in the analysis of school outcomes in 2001 and 2007
Findings
Conclusions

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