# **1. Introduction**

In recent years, interest in early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middleincome countries has expanded considerably. High grade repetition in school, early dropout from school, and poor learning as well as poor health of youth and adults are being traced to malnutrition, disease, and neglect during early childhood. Accumulated evidence reveals associations between cognitive and psycho-social skills, nutrition and health status measured at young ages, on the one hand, and later educational attainment, earnings, and employment outcomes, on the other (e.g., Behrman and Rosenzweig 2004; Currie and Thomas 1999, Murnane, Willett and Levy 1995 and Neal and Johnson 1996 for the United States; Alderman, _et al._ 2001b, Alderman, Behrman and Hoddinott 2005, Alderman, Hoddinott and Kinsey 2006, Glewwe, Jacoby and King 2001, Glewwe and King 2001, Maluccio, _et al._ 2005, Martorell 1999 for developing countries). These life-cycle links suggest that a potentially effective way of alleviating poverty and engendering economic development is through policies that promote better development of cognitive, social, motor, and language skills and health and nutritional status among pre-school-age children.

Accordingly, governments in a number of countries, including the Philippines, have introduced ECD programs for enhancing the learning environments, improving nutrition and reducing disease for preschool children. To date, however, there are few rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of ECD programs on child development that use longitudinal data and attempt to address possible bias in the estimates due to nonexperimental allocation of ECD services across a population. Most studies also do not examine many dimensions of development among young children or incorporate information on whether and how impacts differ depending on age and/or duration of exposure to the ECD intervention (Behrman, Cheng and Todd 2004, Gertler 2004, and Frankenberg, Suriastini and Thomas 2005 are recent exceptions).

In this paper, we estimate the impact of an important ECD initiative of the Philippine government.<sup>1</sup> The overall aim of the program, initiated in the late 1990s, is to enable local governmental units (LGUs or municipalities) within three regions (comprising 13 provinces) to deliver a broader and better set of ECD-related services to pregnant women and children under age seven. Here we address the research question: Did this ECD program have a positive effect on children’s well-being in the form of better cognitive, social, motor, language development and health and nutrition? We use longitudinal survey data collected in three rounds over three years on 6,693 children in randomly selected households. The surveys covered two “treatment” regions that received the ECD program and a “control” or comparison region that had not received the program. Program assignment was non-experimental and so we use difference-in-difference ________________

> 1 Although the program is being coordinated by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), this government program is an interdepartmental program that also involves the Department of Education and the Department of Health.