Faced with COVID-19 (Coronavirus), countries are taking drastic action based on little information. Two tests can help governments shorten and soften economically costly suppression measures while still containing the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The first-a PCR assay-identifies people...

In Central and Eastern European countries, inequalities for Roma families living in marginalized communities start early and are striking. Some of these inequalities reflect hard-wired family circumstances such as being born in poverty. Others reflect lack of opportunities such as limited access...

To aid national and international efforts to support countries in enhancing their pandemic preparedness in the face of COVID-19, this paper draws from the World Bank's Service Delivery Indicator surveys to highlight key aspects of health service preparedness in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania....

This paper compiles project-level data from the World Bank's lending history to describe patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of countries' transition from International Development Association to International Bank for Reconstruction and...

This note summarizes some of the key contributions in the macro- and micro- economic literature on the pathways linking human capital and income growth. Rather than completeness, the objective of this work is to distill some of the most relevant threads in the evolution of these literatures...

This paper documents inequality in health and education outcomes by constructing an index of human capital disaggregated by quintiles of socioeconomic status (SES) for a sample 51 mostly low- and middle-income countries. The index measures the expected future human capital of children born...

Using a new data set comprised of publicly available information, this paper provides cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social spending that covers the three sectors of health, education, and social protection has...