This article presents an approach to public policy in health that comes directly from the literature on public economics. It identifies two characteristic market failures in health. The first is the existence of large externalities in the control of many infectious diseases that are mostly...

Improving education outcomes by disseminating information to parents and thereby encouraging them to become more actively engaged in school oversight is attractive since it can be done relatively cheaply. This study evaluates the impact of alternative approaches to disseminating information...

Sub-Saharan Africa's natural resource-rich countries have poor human development. Children in these countries are more likely to die before their first birthday, more likely to be stunted, and less likely to attend school than children in other countries with similar income. Despite the current...

Early childhood is a critical period for growth and development. Research shows that giving young children enough nurturing and stimulating experiences during these early years not only improves their chances of success in school but can also help them succeed and be more productive later in...

This paper reports on a randomized evaluation of two teacher incentive programs, which were conducted in a nationally representative sample of 420 public primary schools in Guinea. In 140 schools, high-performing teachers were rewarded in-kind, with the value of goods increasing with level of...

Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been...

This study evaluates the impacts of low-cost, performance-based incentives in Tanzanian secondary schools. Results from a two-phase randomized trial show that incentives for teachers led to modest average improvements in student achievement across different subjects. Further, withdrawing...

Four different classroom observation instruments -- from the Service Delivery Indicators, the Stallings Observation System, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, and the Teach classroom observation instrument -- were implemented in about 100 schools across four regions of Tanzania. The...

Pay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while simple comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study...