This paper estimates returns to schooling in Thailand, applying a regression discontinuity approach to the change in the compulsory schooling law in 1978. This law helped to enhance human capital investment on the eve of rapid structural transformation. The returns to schooling based on our...

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...

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 level of educational attainment in Mozambique is one of the lowest in the world and primary school completion rate is also very low, not reaching 40 per cent. Using data from the Mozambican Household Budget Survey 2014/15, we study (1) the determinants of school dropout; (2) the variables...

This paper estimates a private school learning premium in Tanzania by implementing a flexible value-added model with unique administrative data on exam scores. The dataset covers 635,000 secondary school students with information on both their primary and lower secondary school exam records,...

The prevailing aid orthodoxy works well enough in stable environments, but is ill-equipped to navigate contexts of volatility and fragility. The orthodox approach is adept at solving straightforward technical or logistical problems (paving roads, building schools, immunizing children), but often...

In this paper, we study the impact of ethnic fragmentation on the provision of private and public schools, separately. The distinction is made because the two types of schools have different objective functions, a factor which can influence the relationship between ethnic fragmentation and...

In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task. Countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even...

Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America's political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to 'repoliticize' inequality and return...

Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry - that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what policies or organizations look like rather than what they actually do. The...