Early childhood development outcomes play an important role throughout a person's life, affecting one's income-earning capacity and productivity, longevity, health, and cognitive ability. The deleterious effects of poor early childhood development outcomes can be long-lasting, affecting school...

Many developing countries have adopted the market approach for expanding the supply of child care, but little is known about the economic behavior of independent providers. This paper draws on uniquely rich administrative data on child care centers and their inputs from São Paulo to examine the...

This paper examines early childhood development (ECD) outcomes and their association with family characteristics, investments, and environmental factors, with particular emphasis on the inter- generational transmission of cognitive abilities. The paper examines the causal relationship between...

This paper uses data from the Mexican Family Life Survey to estimate the impact of a household member's migration to the United States on the cognitive development of children remaining in Mexico. While there is no developmental effect of a child's sibling migrating to the United States, there...

The effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development, labor market outcomes and well-being. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the first 1,000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical...

Early Childhood Interventions (ECI) are ideally designed to achieve a series of mutually reinforcing objectives with the overarching goal of helping to improve equality of opportunity for children in poverty. In this discussion the authors analize programs targeted to overcome some or all of the...

This presentation deals with the following issue: how poverty, poor health, nutrition and care affect child development. The author reviews a series of "capabilities approaches," including concepts such as the conversion of primary good into the person's ability to promote his/her ends. This...

This presentation discusses the effects of social motivation on brain development in early childhood and the role of emotions on child development. Optimal nutrition and social-emotional development are the basic building blocks for higher level thinking abilities, human development and quality...

This presentation examines the quality of public provided child care versus alternative childcare options, its impact on child development, and the cost-benefit ratio relative to other educational levels as well as availability of resources and the long run impact. The authors seek to answer...

This Strategy (GN-2067-3) summarizes what is known about how to improve primary and secondary education in Latin America and the Caribbean and provides a set of objectives and strategies to guide the IDB in its support of primary and secondary education over the next decade. The paper defines...