In recent years, skills development has become a priority among developed and developing countries alike. The World Bank Group, in its quest to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity, has joined efforts with countries and multilateral development partners to ensure that individuals...

Human development and development are inseparable, and now new evidence emerges that brain development is the key driving mechanism behind this association. The foundations of brain architecture are established early in life. Critical aspects of its structure begin to be shaped by experience...

The objective of this research is to provide analysis on the current skills ecosystem in Moldova. This assessment is based on interviews with private sector representatives, training providers and government representatives, and desk research. The report presents its findings on skills demand...

This report aims to provide policy makers in Albania with new evidence to inform the design and implementation of public policies on post-secondary education, vocational education and training (VET) system labor market information and intermediation, and labor policies. The STEP Employer Survey...

This book explores the premise that coding is an essential 21st century skill required for all. Learning of coding does not merely mean learn the syntax, grammar and usage of a specific computer language like Python or Ruby, but the deeper concept of computational thinking. It is possible to...

In an era of globalization and rapidly changing technology, the nature of work and skills required is also rapidly changing, and it calls for an urgent need to redefine the types of skills considered in public policy. Technology is reshaping the demand for skills by reducing the value of skills...

A number of developing countries are currently promoting vocational education and training (VET) as a way to build human capital and strengthen economic growth. The primary aim of this study is to understand whether VET at the high school level contributes to human capital development in one of...

Firms that provide on-the-job training do so when it is critical to their productivity-and when productivity is critical to their survival. This paper begins by confirming a significant and positive return from on-the-job training on wages and productivity, as well as the presence of positive...

This analysis assesses the role of skills, human capital endowment, and migration as determinants of Sub-Saharan Africa's participation in manufacturing global value chains. Due to lack of reliable data on skilled labor, skilled and unskilled labor contents in exports were generated from the...

There is a growing body of literature exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes to this research by using data on the task content of occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data, as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes based on U.S. data do not...