During Vietnam’s two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallensharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly—macro trendsthat are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. Weinvestigate whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnameseparents are in fact making a tradeoff between quantity and “quality” of children. Wepresent private tutoring—a widespread education phenomenon in Vietnam—as a newmeasure of household investment in children’s quality, combining it with traditional measuresof household education investments. To assess the quantity-quality tradeoff, weinstrument for family size using the commune distance to the nearest family planningcenter. Our IV estimation results based on data from the Vietnam Household LivingStandards Surveys (VHLSSs) and other sources show that rural families do indeed investless in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings. Thiseffect holds for several different indicators of educational investment and is robust to differentdefinitions of family size, identification strategies, and model specifications thatcontrol for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. Finally, ourestimation results suggest that private tutoring may be a better measure of quality-orientedhousehold investments in education than traditional measures like enrollment, which arearguably less nuanced and less household-driven.
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