中国农村儿童早期发展:政府投资的效益-成本分析

doi:10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2019.03.010

摘要/Abstract

摘要： 儿童早期发展（Early Childhood Development，ECD）项目主要目标之一是为儿童接受小学和更高的教育做学前准备。众所周知，ECD项目大部分收益体现在参与项目儿童会有更高的入学率、更少辍学并获得更好的学业表现。然而，中低收入国家往往不了解ECD项目的投资价值，因此，政府迫切需要有相关数据，以便为实施推广ECD项目提供政策决策的参考。本研究利用政府发布的公开数据和相关研究数据，采用世界银行研发的ECD效益成本测算工具，测算了中国政府在农村地区开展ECD项目的效益-成本比。结果表明，在中国农村地区，政府投资ECD项目的回报率非常高，其效益-成本比为4.2-9.3，如果换算为投资回报率的话，大致为7-15%。与政府投资的其它项目相比，这一回报率较高，也与世界上其它国家实施的ECD项目的投资回报率大致相同。因此，从效益-成本角度考虑，中国政府应该大力开展ECD项目，尤其侧重提高农村地区人力资本质量，为中国未来社会经济可持续发展提供良好的人力资本储备。

关键词: 儿童早期发展, 效益-成本分析, 中国农村, 人力资本

Abstract: One of the primary goals of Early Childhood Development (ECD) initiatives is to prepare children for their eventual participation in elementary school and beyond. It is well known that a large share of ECD's benefits is realized through higher enrollment, less dropout and higher performance. Governments in low and middle-income countries, however, often do not know the value of such investments and are seeking knowledge of the returns to state-supported ECD programs. This paper uses a World Bank-produced ECD calculator to estimate the economic benefits of early child development (ECD) programs in China. According to our findings, which utilize high quality data that are shown in the paper supported by academic research or government source of information, the returns to investment in economic terms are high. We find that the benefit-cost ratio is from 4.2 to 8.4. Such returns are shown to be higher than many other government-supported initiatives and are equally as high as those found in many other countries.

Key words: early childhood development, benefit-cost analysis, rural China, human capital

王蕾, 贤悦, 张偲琪, 白钰, 杜燕, 缅诺·普拉丹, 罗斯高. 中国农村儿童早期发展:政府投资的效益-成本分析[J]. 华东师范大学学报(教育科学版), 2019, 37(3): 118-128.

Wang Lei, Xian Yue, Zhang Siqi, Bai Yu, Dorien Emmers, Menno Pradhan, Scott Rozelle. Benefit-Cost Calculations of Government Investment into Early Childhood Development in Rural China[J]. Journal of East China Normal University(Educationa, 2019, 37(3): 118-128.

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