According to T.W. Schultz, the returns to human capital are highest in economic environments experiencing unexpected price, productivity, and technology shocks that create"disequilibria."In such environments, the ability of firms and individuals to adapt their resource allocations to...

More attention and resources have been devoted in recent years to early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middle-income countries. Rigorous studies on the effectiveness of ECD-related programs for improving children's development in various dimensions in the developing world are scant. 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...

From the mid-1950s to the 1960s, the Government of Peru undertook a major expansion of public education, increasing the number of schools, requiring primary schools that offered an incomplete cycle to add grades, and increasing school inputs (principally teachers and textbooks). The paper...

Since the mid 1950s, Peru's education policies have been designed to raise skill levels and make education available to more of the population. Those policies rested mainly on expanding the number of schools and as a result, school enrollment rates and attainment levels rose. However, an...

Many educators and policymakers have argued for lenient grade promotion policy - even automatic promotion - in developing country settings where grade retention rates are high. The argument assumes that grade retention discourages persistence or continuation in school and that the promotion of...

Many societies underinvest in girls'and women's education for three main reasons: high direct, indirect, and cultural costs; too few private benefits; and parent's failure to consider the social benefits of education. Strategies that have increased female enrollment are those that: lower the...

Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. Although there have been excellent reviews of the different methods that an evaluator can choose in order to estimate impact, there has not been sufficient attention given to questions...

Obtaining consistent estimates on poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers. However, these objectives are not readily achieved in practice when household consumption data are neither frequently collected, nor constructed...

Building on the earlier work, this paper provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam in several aspects, including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, the paper offers a comparative analysis of the trends in...