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Blog Post
November 08, 2023
How stable do emerging markets look now, in 2023? Which countries would be most and least resilient if another global adverse shock were to happen? A simple indicator constructed from a small set of economic and institutional variables was able to identify in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and...
Blog Post
October 17, 2023
There’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit in global development. On the issues that matter most, from preventing the next pandemic to expanding migration opportunities, and financing climate adaptation, even minor progress tends to require big financial commitments and often faces deep political resist...
Blog Post
October 05, 2023
A year ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that an alarming 60 percent of developing countries and 25 percent of emerging market economies were either in debt distress or at severe risk of default. The confluence of severe shocks in the period 2020-22, starting with the COVID-19 pan...
Blog Post
September 22, 2023
We’ve updated our 2022 working paper with Laura Moscoviz on long run trends in education quality with several new surveys from around the world. Notably, a new survey round for India (NFHS-5) casts doubt on earlier data (NFHS-3). Dropping the suspect data, India’s current learning levels are unchang...
Blog Post
July 30, 2023
In a new paper, we examine the connection between exposure to lead—a dangerous but prevalent neurotoxicant—and children’s learning outcomes. We find that lead poisoning alone could account for more than 20 percent of the learning gap between rich and poor countries. Given the comparative ease of, sa...
Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...