The authors present new estimates of educational attainment in 71 developing countries for the years 1985, 1990 and 1995. They also project levels of educational attainment through the year 2020 by using the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's projections of...

This paper analyzes the relationship between whether a young person has a disability, the poverty status of their household, and their school participation using 11 household surveys from nine developing countries. Between 1 and 2 percent of the population is identified as having a disability....

The authors analyze the relationship between orphan status, household wealth, and child school enrollment using data collected in the 1990s from 28 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and one country in Southeast Asia. The findings point to considerable diversity-so...

Scaling up early childhood development services has the potential to increase children's cognitive and socio-emotional development and promote school readiness in a large segment of the population. This study used a randomized controlled trial approach to evaluate three scaled-up programs...

This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of...

Addressing the question,"What is the work status of the world's working-age population and subgroups thereof?"The author gathers data for many countries and infers data where it is missing (which requires making"heroic assumptions"). The results are of course only as good as the data are...

According to a theoretical model, school autonomy and parental participation in schools, can increase student learning through separate channels. Greater school autonomy increases the rent that can be distributed among stakeholders in the school, while institutions for parental participation...

Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. The authors evaluate the impact of a program that gives scholarships to girls making the transition between the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school in Cambodia. They show...

This paper compares how results using various methods to construct asset indices match results using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes are quite robust to the...

Using data assembled from the Demographic Health Surveys of over 50 countries and from the National Family Health Surveys of individual states in India, the authors create a new data set of comparable indicators of gender disparity. They establish three findings: 1) As is by now well-known, the...