Governments in low and middle-income countries are increasingly investing in social protection, and also address many of their own people's 'humanitarian' needs themselves. For their international partners, who may have an important role in filling gaps when household needs exceed national...

The objective of this note is to highlight how social protection can help lay the human capital foundations needed for poverty reduction and economic growth in the East Asia and Pacific region while also building, protecting, and deploying the human capital needed to keep up with and take...

Exploiting cross-birth cohort and cross-country variation from a pool of 188 household surveys from 111 countries, this paper measures how life expectancy at birth affects lifetime education and earnings. On average, individuals add one year of schooling for every 8.3 years of increased life...

This paper studies economic growth in Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to attain the status and characteristics of a high-income country. Future economic growth is simulated under a business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow their historical or recent...

Armenia, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan have all experienced substantial out-migration of workers and an associated inflow of workers' remittances over the past two decades. These four countries have much higher human capital, as measured by the Human Capital Index, than is typical...

The World Bank Human Capital Index (HCI) is based on the productivity gains of future workers from human capital accumulation. But in many developing countries, a sizeable fraction of people are not employed, or are in jobs in which they cannot fully use their skills and cognitive abilities to...

This paper leverages quasi-experimental variation in increased access to basic formal education, introduced by a large-scale school construction program in Indonesia in the 1970s, to quantify the benefits to the children of women targeted by the program. Novel and rich data allow the analysis of...

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...

This paper reviews the evidence on the importance of human capital for macro-economic development. Through the lens of a simple aggregate production function, human capital might increase output per capita by directly entering in the production process, incentivising the accumulation of...

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning-an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to 2017....