The Impact of Natural Disasters on Education in Indonesia

Indonesian government data on enrollment in primary and lower secondary school are used with data from the DesInventar database on natural disasters to explore the ways natural disasters influence district level enrollment in education. The paper employs regional fixed effects models, beginning with a simple model controlling for time and region and then exploring the inclusion of poverty, literacy, and interaction terms in the regression. The first regression’s estimated coefficients suggest that disasters are generally (but not always) associated with lower enrollment. An additional twelve people reported missing in the average district was associated with a decrease in primary school enrollment of 0.2% while damage to 22,323 ha of plantation/forest is associated with a 1.69% decrease in secondary school enrollment. The regressions also indicate that higher poverty exacerbates the negative impact of disasters on enrollment and that the way disasters affect primary and secondary school enrollment may be quite different.