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Blog Post
May 09, 2022
Since the start of the 20th century, global average life expectancy has risen from 32 to 72 years. The introduction of antimicrobials—such as antibiotics—to treat infections, combined with vaccines and improved infection control, helped significantly reduce the risks from infectious diseases, which ...
Blog Post
April 28, 2022
In the past two years, we have all learned that the end of a COVID-19 wave is the end of a chapter, not the end of the story. Ongoing COVID transmission means the risk of new variants of pandemic potential is ever present and vaccination remains our best defence. The primary near-term challenges for...
Blog Post
April 21, 2022
Suppose you’re the minister of education in a lower-middle income country. It’s budget season. You have a meeting tomorrow with the finance minister to make your case for more education spending. You know she’s skeptical that money is really what’s holding your school system back. The World Bank say...
Blog Post
April 19, 2022
Has the Modi government accelerated or decelerated poverty reduction? It’s hard to know, as India has effectively stopped measuring poverty. A new World Bank paper using private-sector survey data finds the share of people living below $1.90 per day has been falling, but is higher than we thought, a...
Blog Post
February 03, 2022
A couple weeks ago, Uganda finally ended the longest national school closure on record, reopening its public schools after nearly two full years. One might anticipate a fairly dramatic decline in learning levels. Indeed, in a very non-scientific poll of my twitter followers, the dominant view was th...