This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China's shift in focus from 'quantity' to 'quality', and evidencebased guidelines for effective implementation of India's New Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). The divergent...

Standardization was the scheme that replaced meritocracy in Sri Lanka education, with positive discrimination to increase the majority Sinhalese community's university enrolment. It did so by minimizing better-qualified minority Tamils' university entry, even as the quest for Tamil separatism...

I evaluate the impact of the right to education from the passing of the Right to Education Act in India in 2009. This Act guaranteed free education to children aged 6-14 years, including children with disabilities. Given that the school participation deficit associated with disability is large,...

I study the impact of school consolidation on enrolment and achievement, using its staggered roll-out in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Across the years 2014, 2016, and 2017, Rajasthan merged many of its grade 1-5 schools with grade 6-10 schools to create grade 1-10 'model' schools. Twenty-three...

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for the Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on the differences in educational outcomes and opportunities across the population, including...

Raising schooling quality in low-income countries is a pressing challenge. Substantial research has considered the impact of cutting class sizes on skills acquisition. Considerably less attention has been given to the extent to which peer effects, which refer to class composition, also may...

The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which - if continued for another 2-3 years - would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the...

This paper reviews what has been learned over many decades of foreign aid to education. It discusses what works and what does not and in this discussion draws attention to the fact that even a simple assessment requires more than providing a uniform check-list of inputs. It shows the positive...

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 unemployment. This paper uses a longitudinal...

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 empirical evidence in particular is inconclusive, and...