A straightforward way of keeping children in school is increasing the duration of compulsory education. Evidence of the impact of this type of policy in Western countries is abundant. However, its effectiveness has been rarely tested in low-income countries. Using panel data of low-income and...

Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...