Many international comparisons of education over the past 50 years have included some measure of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) in their schooling. Results have typically confirmed the common sense notion that a student’s exposure in school to the assessed concepts, operationalized in...

This report explores the results of the latest round of PISA for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), showcasing the results for the region, the differences within the region and between the region and the rest of the world. For this round of PISA, 14 countries of LAC participated...

Six new aggregate measures capturing various dimensions of governance provide new evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton provide new empirical evidence of a...

In recent years, the growing interest of academics and policymakers in governance has been reflected in the proliferation cross-country indices measuring various aspects of governance. In this paper we explain how a simple variant of an unobserved components model can be used to combine the...

Updated governance indicators report estimates of six dimensions of governance for 175 countries in 2000-01. They can be compared with those constructed for 1997-98. Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton construct aggregate governance indicators for six dimensions of governance, covering 175...

Which of the democratic checks and balances - opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press - is the most forceful? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990s, the secret-police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks using...

This paper presents the results of an impact evaluation, with an experimental design, which estimates the effect on learning math of a remote tutoring program offered to girls and boys aged 9-14 years in three departments of El Salvador. The program used low-tech interventions such as text...