School attendance and poverty in an oil boom context in Chad

Oil resources have enabled Chad to increase public financing for education and to achieve high economic growth rates. Regarding these policies to supporting the education sector, we assume that the standard of living of households does not explain the school attendance. We test empirically this hypothesis using data from the MICS conducted in 2010 and Education Statistical Yearbooks. Using a bivariate probit model, the results show that school attendance and child labor depend of households’ standard of living after controlling for other relevant characteristics. In particular, a child from a non-poor household has a lower (higher) probability to be involved in the child labor (enrolled in school) compared to a child from a poor household. Although these results are classical in the economic literature, they are rather surprising in the case of Chad regarding the priority given to education by authorities. We identify four possible explanations, (i) the low level of these investments compared to international standards; (ii) the loss of public expenditures, caused by institutional factors; (iii) the misallocation of educational infrastructures and human resources by region and (iv) an inequity sharing of spin-offs of economic growth induced by oil resources. These results raise the issue of the sustainability of the Chadian economy after oil.