Schooling Is Not Education! Using Assessment to Change the Politics of Non-Learning
5/6/13
Most of the world’s children now live in countries on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary completion by 2015.
Publications
Time-Bound Labor Access to the United States: A Four-Way Win for the Middle Class, Low-Skill Workers, Border Security, and Migrants
4/11/13
The US economy needs low-skill workers now more than ever, and that requires a legal channel for the large-scale, employment-based entry of low-skill workers. The alternative is what the country has now: a giant black market in unauthorized labor that hinders job creation and harms border security. A legal time-bound labor-access program could benefit the American middle class and low-skill workers, improve US border security, and create opportunities for foreign workers.
It’s All About MeE: Using Structured Experiential Learning (“e”) to Crawl the Design Space - Working Paper 322
4/8/13
Here we extend the basic idea of rigorous impact evaluation—the use of a valid counterfactual to make judgments about causality—to emphasize that the techniques of impact evaluation can be directly useful to implementing organizations (as opposed to impact evaluation being seen by implementing organizations as only an external threat to their funding).
From Schooling Goals to Learning Goals: How Fast Can Student Learning Improve?
9/28/12
In this paper, Amanda Beatty and Lant Pritchett document the current (slow) rate of improving on learning assessments and explore some of the possibilities for setting more ambitious goals.
Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) - Working Paper 299
6/22/12
The authors argue that many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry. They present a new framework for breaking out of capability traps.
The Negative Consequences of Overambitious Curricula in Developing Countries - Working Paper 293
4/18/12
Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty argue that many education systems are attempting to push children through curricular material faster than their teachers can teach it and their students can learn it. Students fall behind and eventually stop learning. The authors provide a formal model of this phenomenon and provide empirical evidence on its implications.
Capability Traps? The Mechanisms of Persistent Implementation Failure - Working Paper 234
12/7/10
Economic growth is one aspect of development; state capability is another. This paper shows that many countries remain in “state capability traps” and suggests ways to sabotage persistent techniques of failure.
The Illusion of Equality: The Educational Consequences of Blinding Weak States, For Example - Working Paper 178
8/19/09
Efforts to decentralize educational systems often arouse fears that the quality of schooling will become less equal as a result. But what’s the evidence? CGD non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett and co-author Martina Viarengo show in a new CGD working paper that the supposedly greater equality of centralized systems is often little more than the illusion of a bureaucracy blinded to local realities.
READ MORE
The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers across the U.S. Border - Working Paper 148
7/3/08
Are your wages determined by what you know, or where you are? This paper estimates how the wages of workers in 42 developing countries would change if the same people could work in the United States. It uses a rich new database on over two million workers around the world. A worker from the median country would earn about 2.7 times as much in the US as at home. This means that (1) for many countries, the wage gaps caused by barriers to movement across international borders are among the largest known forms of wage discrimination; (2) these gaps represent one of the largest remaining price distortions in any global market; and (3) simply allowing labor mobility can reduce a given household’s poverty to a much greater degree than most known antipoverty interventions inside developing countries.
Income per Natural: Measuring Development as if People Mattered More Than Places - Working Paper 143
3/13/08
Data on the average income of a resident of Ecuador is easy to find. But until now there has been no data on the average income of a person born in Ecuador, regardless of where she or he lives. In this paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett introduce a new dataset, income per natural: the mean annual income of persons born in a given country regardless of residence. Turns out that defining things this way makes a big difference, and not just for tiny nations. Income per natural differs by more than 10% from income per resident for dozens of countries including Vietnam, Kenya and Morocco. In other words, one of the largest sources of increased income for people in many parts of the developing world is moving to another country.
Learn More
Bilateral Guest Worker Agreements: A win-win solution for rich countries and poor people in the developing world
4/25/07
Increased labor mobility offers potentially huge gains for the developing and developed world, but migration is massively unpopular in rich countries. In this CGD Brief, non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett lays out a solution that is beneficial to poor people and potentially politically acceptable to rich country voters: temporary legal work programs negotiated bilaterally, with rich countries certifying labor shortages in specific industries and labor-sending countries ensuring that temporary workers return home. On Thursday, May 17th Lant will answer your questions live online at Ask CGD. Submit a question nowLearn more
Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility
9/12/06
This controversial book argues that irresistible demographic forces for greater international labor mobility are being checked by immovable anti-immigration ideas of rich-country citizens. Pritchett proposes breaking the gridlock through policies that support development while also being politically acceptable in rich countries. These include greater use of temporary worker permits, permit rationing, reliance on bilateral rather than multilateral agreements, and protection of migrants' fundamental human rights.
A Millennium Learning Goal: Measuring Real Progress in Education - Working Paper 97
8/28/06
The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) seek to ensure that all children complete primary school by 2015. But school completion rates don't tell us how much--or how little--the kids actually learn. This new working paper co-authored by CGD non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett shows that even in countries that meet the primary school completion goal, most students fall short of minimum competency in reading, writing and arithmetic. The answer, the authors argue, is a Millennium Learning Goal that measures how much students actually know. Learn more
Towards a New Consensus for Addressing the Global Challenge of the Lack of Education - Working Paper 43
6/29/04
This paper is part of the Copenhagen Consensus process, which aims to assess and evaluate the opportunities available to address the ten largest challenges facing the world. One of these ten challenges is the “lack of education.” This paper provides an analytical framework to evaluate the various options that can be used to address this issue.
Boom Towns and Ghost Countries: Geography, Agglomeration, and Population Mobility - Working Paper 36
2/18/04
Ghost towns dot the West of the United States. These cities boomed for a period and then, for various reasons, fell into a process of decline and have shrunk to a small fraction of their former population. Are there ghost countries—countries that, if there were population mobility, would only have a very small fraction of their current population? This paper carries out four empirical illustrations of the potential magnitude of the "ghost country" problem by showing that the "desired population" of any given geographic region varies substantially.
Who is not Poor? Proposing a Higher International Standard for Poverty - Working Paper 33
11/1/03
Poverty reduction is now, and quite properly should remain, the primary objective of the World Bank. But, when the World Bank dreams of a world free of poverty—what should it be dreaming? I argue in this essay that the dream should be a bold one, that treats citizens of all nations equally in defining poverty, and that sets a high standard for what eliminating poverty will mean for human well-being.
Solutions when the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development - Working Paper 10
9/1/02
The welfare of the poor turns in large measure not only on technocratic development "policies", but the effective delivery of key public services, core elements of which require thousands of face-to-face discretionary transactions ("practices") by service providers. This paper presents eight current proposals for improving service delivery, on the basis of a principal-agent model of incentives that explores how these various proposals change flows of resources, information, decision-making, delivery mechanisms, and accountability.