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Publications (40)
Working Paper
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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: first, supply-side capability interventions that...
Working Paper
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This paper develops a model of opportunistic behaviour in which an incumbent government resort to expansionary fiscal and/or monetary stimuli to foster economic growth and thus, maximize the probability of re-election. Using a panel dataset of 51 African countries covering the period 1980 to 2012...
Research Brief
In addition to large class sizes, peer effects, such as overage-for-grade and late-starting pupils, are challenges for the successful development of education sectors in East Africa; there is a comparative lack of research on the impact of peer effects. Household surveys provide good data with which...
Research Brief
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Each dollar of aid per year provides 0.17 people with access to water or sanitation. This amounts to a cost of US$5.88 per person. Due to economies of scale, countries with large populations benefit more from aid to the water and sanitation sectors. Institutional reforms that facilitate the...
Working Paper
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Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper examines...
Working Paper
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– Comparing Design and Implementation Errors Across Alternative Mechanisms
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach is most effective at minimizing inclusion and...
Working Paper
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– Aggregating Impacts of School-Feeding Programmes on Education, Health and Nutrition: Two Proposed Methodologies
School-feeding is an important intervention to attract children to school and augment their learning. The benefits of school-feeding cover several domains. Key to the overall assessment of these benefits is understanding how different implementation models compare to each other and to other...
Working Paper
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– The Impact of Oportunidades’ Electronic Payment System in Mexico
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via a bank account is found to have implications in terms of reallocation between saving...
Research Brief
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While the majority of interventions against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria had positive short-term effects, these were frequently not translated into long-term sustainable results. Cash transfers may have the potential of reducing HIV transmissions but the effect is so far insignificant...
Research Brief
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Microfinance evaluations reveal a positive impact on per capita income, non-land asset value and poverty incidence. Across countries and methodologies, microfinance is most likely to have a short-term positive effect; regionally, the most positive impacts are seen in Africa. Women tend to benefit...
Working Paper
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The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...
Working Paper
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– The WDR+20 Landscape of Core and Supportive Functions
This paper discusses shifts in development assistance for health (DAH) since 1990, analyses the nature of the current distribution of funding, and considers future implications. Based on Jamison et al. (1998) and Frenk and Moon (2013), we introduce an ‘essential functions’ framework, which provides...
Working Paper
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– Challenges and Opportunities
This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these specific interventions has varied greatly over the...
Working Paper
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– the Role of Aid
Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a substantial proportion of total sector financing in sub...
Working Paper
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Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of child deaths are caused by these diseases is...
Working Paper
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This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the most deprived nor relatively well-off countries...
Displaying 16 of 40 results