The Millennium Development Goals set quantitative targets for poverty reduction and improvements in health, education, gender equality, the environment, and other aspects of human welfare. At existing rates of progress many countries will fall short of these goals. However, if developing...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, focusing on the role of...

This paper explores the impact of remittances on poverty, education, and health in 11 Latin American countries using nationally representative household surveys and making an explicit attempt to account for one of the inherent costs associated with migration-the potential income that the migrant...

Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find...

This paper investigates the differential impacts of foreign ownership on wages for different types of workers (in terms of educational background and gender) in Vietnam using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004. Whereas most previous studies have compared wage levels...

Between 1996 and 2006, Nepal experienced violent civil conflict as a consequence of a Maoist insurgency, which many argue also brought about an increase in female empowerment. This paper exploits variations in exposure to conflict by birth cohort, survey date, and district to estimate the impact...

Breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty requires far-reaching actions in the education sector. Widespread poverty affects both students' performance and their availability to attend school. Low-quality education leads to low income, which in turn perpetuates poverty. Furthermore,...

The author tests the hypothesis that education improves health and increases people's life expectancy. Smoking histories-reconstructed from retrospective data in the National Health Interview Surveys in the United States-show that after 1950, when information about the dangers associated with...

The author studies the long-term impact of genocide during the period of the Khmer Rouge (1975-79) in Cambodia and contributes to the literature on the economic analysis of conflict. Using mortality data for siblings from the Cambodia Demographic and Health Survey in 2000, he shows that excess...

This paper analyzes the effects of all-weather rural roads on households' net output prices, education and health in a poor, drought-prone region of India. Of 30 villages originally surveyed in 2001-02, when two had such roads, a further nine received them between January 2007 and December 2009...