Investing in Early Human Development: Timing and Economic Efficiency

By O. Doyle, Colm Harmon, James J. Heckman, Richard E. Tremblay. Economics and Human Biology, 2009

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policy discussions to ameliorate socioeconomic (SES) inequalities are increasingly focused on investments in early childhood. Yet such interventions are costly to implement, and clear evidence on the optimal time to intervene to yield a high economic and social return in the future is meagre. The majority of successful early childhood interventions start in the preschool years. However socioeconomic gradients in cognitive skills, socio-emotional functioning and health can be observed by age three, suggesting that preventative programmes starting earlier in childhood may be even more effective. We discuss the optimal timing of early childhood intervention with reference to recent research in developmental neuroscience. We motivate the need for early intervention by providing an overview of the impact of adverse risk factors during the antenatal and early childhood periods on outcomes later in life. We provide a brief review of the economic rationale for investing early in life and propose the “antenatal investment hypothesis”. We conclude by discussing a suite of new European interventions that will inform this optimal timing debate.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1957a91dfcc64a816addd3196c48be7270755fe6

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Citations in the corpus

Do children benefit from universal early childhood education and care? A meta-analysis of evidence from natural experiments (2018, background): “The brain is particularly “malleable” during the early years of life (Doyle et al., 2009).”
Children's Schooling and Parental Migration: Empirical Evidence on the 'Left Behind' Generation in Albania (2010, positive): “Preschool attendance is also relevant for younger children (Doyle et al., 2009); however, in Albania, there are no public programs devoted to children at this age “Did you enroll in school this academic year?” “Are you currently attending school?” Orazem and King (2008) note that two children of the”
Canadian evidence on ten years of universal preschool policies: The good and the bad (2015, background): “…find significant positive effects on cognitive outcomes (letter-word identification, spelling and applied problems) and measures of school readiness (Gormley and Gayer, 2005; Gormley et al., 2005; Magnuson et al., 2007, 2004), and especially so for disadvantaged children (e.g. Doyle et al., 2009.”
A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety (2011, background): “Given that self-control is malleable, it could be a prevention target, and the key policy question becomes when to intervene to achieve the best cost–benefit ratio, in childhood or in adolescence (19, 20)? Regardless of its malleability, however, if low self-control is influential, policy-makers mig”