While increased heterogeneity in schools (diversity) leads to reduced segregation and greater equity for students from different family backgrounds, it is often expected to have a negative impact on overall performance, and on student well-being and motivation. In this study, neither...

Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term)...

In this paper we investigate how country shareholding arrangements affect the lending of multilateral development banks (MDBs) under different economic conditions and over time. To do so, we consider three different types of MDBs - one dominated by non-borrowers (the World Bank), another...

Aid fragmentation is widely recognized as being detrimental to development outcomes. We re-investigate the impact of fragmentation on aid effectiveness in the context of growth, bureaucratic policy, and education, focusing on a number of conceptually different indicators of fragmentation, and...

Only three years after its initial endorsement by the World Bank and the IMF in 1996, the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) - Initiative was considerably altered and enhanced. How did this change come about? Neither developments in economic theory, nor empirical evidence of changed...

As opposed to many other school inputs, textbooks have frequently been demonstrated to significantly foster student achievement. Using the rich data set provided by the 'Program on the Analysis of Education Systems' (PASEC) for five francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes...

Primary school enrolment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed-term)...

Economists have long been questioning the usefulness of the traditional, highly regulatory international commodity policy. In recent years, the failure of this policy has become evident. Could price and earnings stabilisation through price risk management instruments represent a viable alternative?