Working Paper
Choices for spending government revenue
This paper examines a broad range of opportunities for addressing the pressing human development needs of low-income countries by using new oil, gas, and mineral discoveries. It assesses how much of an impact can be made on the funding gaps for...
Working Paper
Patterns and trends in horizontal inequality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
We analyse horizontal inequality in wealth and in years of education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the period 2001–13. We find that the trend in horizontal inequality is similar to the trend in vertical inequality over the period of...
Working Paper
Schooling Inequality, Returns to Schooling, and Earnings Inequality
Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these ‘quantity’ and ‘price’ components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in...
Working Paper
Aid, education policy, and development
This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that...
Working Paper
Inequality of Opportunity in Educational Achievements
This paper evaluates fairness in educational achievements through the ordered pair (WEEOp, IEOp) whose components provide: (i) A measure of social welfare which accounts for the achievement of less-advantaged pupils and (ii) a synthetic index of...
Working Paper
Public and Private Expenditures on Human Capital Accumulation in India
We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent’s human capital serves as a productive input in the child’s human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the...
Working Paper
Ethnic Heterogeneity and Public Goods Provision in Zambia
The hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational...
Working Paper
Dimensions of African Inequality
This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces...
Working Paper
Lofty pine and clinging vine
We investigate the heterogeneous and nonlinear intergenerational transmission channels of education and the impact on this of house price appreciation. Using the China Household Finance Survey 2011, we construct household history of property...
Working Paper
Education Policy, Vocational Training, and the Youth in Sub-Saharan Africa
Technical, vocational education, and training has remained an explosive topic because it can create a divided society in terms of education and the benefits associated with it. Internationally, it has always been a complex and controversial topic...
Working Paper
The Success of Learnerships?
Vocational training programmes, like South Africa’s learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth...
Working Paper
Promoting Education within the Context of a Neo-Patrimonial State
In the first two or three decades of independence, Nigeria, like the rest of Africa. placed heavy emphasis on expanding educational opportunities from primary school through university. This has resulted in a very impressive increase in the number of...
Journal Article
What works to improve the quality of student learning in developing countries?
We conducted a systematic review to identify policy interventions that improve education quality and student learning in developing countries. Relying on a theory of change typology, we highlight three main drivers of change of education quality: (1)...
Working Paper
Education, Skill, and Earnings
This paper provides evidence on the nature of returns to education in Ghana and confirms the emerging empirical literature on the convexity of returns to education in Ghana. Using a basic Mincerian, model we find that returns to education more than...
Working Paper
The effect of China’s One Child Policy on sex selection, family size, and the school enrolment of daughters
I first document that the introduction of the One Child Policy dramatically increased sex selection in certain regions, and that the Chinese government responded to this by allowing parents who had a daughter as their first child to try for a second...
Working Paper
Private Returns to Education for Wage-employees and the Self-employed in Uganda
The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate...
Working Paper
Income Inequality in Latin America
The paper reviews the extent of the income inequality decline that took place in Latin America in 2002-10 and then focuses on the factors that may explain such decline. These include a lowered skill premium following an expansion of secondary...
Working Paper
Impact of Education on Inequality Across the Wage Distribution Profile in Cameroon, 2005-10
This paper evaluates the impact of education on measured inequality across the wage distribution using pooled records from the 2005 and 2010 Cameroon labour force surveys, wage equations and standard inequality measures. Returns to education...
Working Paper
The Main Obstacles to Firms’ Growth in Senegal
Productivity gains are the prime engine of economic growth. This paper uses a rich amount of firms’ accounting information from the Single Information Collecting Centre in Senegal over the period 1998-2011. To investigate the two main obstacles to...
Working Paper
Impact of school feeding programmes on educational outcomes
Food for Education (FFE) programmes have been implemented in developing countries since the 1960s. This paper examines the impact of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) school feeding programme on pupils’ attendance and girls’ enrolment rate within...
Working Paper
Sharing in Community-based Social Services in Rural Tanzania
The first part of the paper describes steps which Tanzania took in order to provide key social services to her people. Tanzania made great efforts within the ujamaa socialist system to provide free social services for rural as well as urban people...
Working Paper
A Review of Social Policy Implementation in Nigeria with Emphasis on Education
This paper presents a brief history of social services provision in Nigeria with special reference to education. It argues that the problems of implementation of social policies are due to state monopolies; the negative effects of structural...
Working Paper
The impact of educational achievement on the integration and wellbeing of Afghan refugee youth in the UK
Unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children have arrived in Europe over the last decade, and young Afghans account for the highest proportion of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children across the UK. Despite research exploring the...
Working Paper
Provision of Health Care and Education in Transitional Asia
This paper examines the impact of the transition to a market economy on health and education outcomes in transitional Asia, with particular focus on the case of Vietnam. After examining a variety of empirical evidence, several lessons emerge. First...
Working Paper
Community and Village-Based Provision of Key Social Services
The first part of the paper describes steps which Tanzania took in order to provide key social services to her people. Tanzania made great efforts within the ujamaa socialist system to provide free social services for rural as well as urban people...
Working Paper
Inequality in Income and Access to Education
In the current debate on the relationship between inequality in income distribution and growth one of the possible link works through the access to education. After reviewing this debate, a formal model shows how the imperfection of financial markets...
Working Paper
A Theory of Association
The utility from some 'commodities' depends on the allocation rule used to distribute it. If, for example, a prize for excellence in some field is given frequently to the highest bidders, its recipients would feel less happy than they would otherwise...
Working Paper
Is the education of local children influenced by living nearby a refugee camp?
This paper studies to what extent and in what ways access to educational services and schooling outcomes of local children are influenced by the presence of a refugee camp in or around their community. Taking the case of Congolese refugees in Rwanda...
Working Paper
Gender-based violence and gender bias in schooling decision
This paper examines the impact of gender based violence against women and girls (GBV), in the environment the children live in, on school attendance, school achievement, as well as boys’ and girls’ dropouts. Based on the sixth phase of the...
Working Paper
Intersociety Literacy Comparisons
Basu and Foster (1998) characterized a sophisticated literacy measure using five axioms. In this paper we argue that if a measure satisfies three of their five axioms, namely, anonymity, monotonicity and externality, then also it becomes suitable in...
Working Paper
Spatial Inequality for Manufacturing Wages in Five African Countries
This paper uses data on individual earnings in manufacturing industry for five African countries in the early 1990s to test whether firms located in the capital city pay higher wages than firms located elsewhere, and whether such benefits accrue to...
Working Paper
Does Educational Achievement Help to Explain Income Inequality?
In this paper we propose to measure the inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational...
Working Paper
Wealth Distribution, Lobbying and Economic Growth
This paper presents a model allowing one to analyze the joint determination of inequality, taxes, human capital and growth. We consider the political economy of redistribution between three income groups in a dynamic economy. The paper seeks to...
Working Paper
The gender gap, education, and the life cycle profile in the Brazilian formal labour market
We study the trajectory of the gender gap over time and over the life cycle, using a matched employer-employee data from the formal labour market in Brazil. We document the evolution of participation and earnings for both males and females during the...
Working Paper
The Medium- and Long-term Effects of an Expansion of Education on Poverty in Côte d'Ivoire
I use a dynamic microsimulation model to analyse the distributional effects of an expansion of education in Côte d’Ivoire in the medium and long term. The simulations are performed in order to replicate several policies in force or subject to debate...
Working Paper
User Fees, Expenditure Restructuring and Voucher Systems in Education
The analysis of the optimal funding of education is complicated by the numerous and serious market failures which are likely to characterize a free market for education. Prominent amongst these are the likely external benefits of education, stressed...
Working Paper
Gender inequality in employment in Mozambique
We investigate the trend in the gender employment gap in the expanding non-subsistence sector of the economy in Mozambique, a country still characterized by a large subsistence agricultural sector. We show evidence that the gender gap has widened...
Working Paper
Educational inequality in Mozambique
In very poor countries, inequality often means that a small part of the population maintains living standards far above the rest. This is also true for educational inequality in Mozambique: only a small segment of the population has access to higher...