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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
September 13, 2023
For 20 years, the Commitment to Development Index has assessed countries' policies and the level of effort they go to in order to contribute to international development. Because development depends on much more than foreign aid, the Index looks at countries’ performance across eight different polic...
BRIEFS
September 13, 2023
The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 40 of the world’s most powerful countries on policies that affect global development. In an increasingly interconnected world, decisions made by the richest countries have impacts far beyond their borders, and often disproportionately affect the world’...
Blog Post
September 05, 2023
We know from data across countries that far too many children around the world experience violence at school. For example, evidence from 20 African countries shows high rates of both physical and sexual violence. But qualitative studies with smaller samples or more targeted quantitative studies can ...
Blog Post
August 30, 2023
There’s a representation problem in the fields of economics and research that has been well documented. As my colleagues have written about previously here and here, studies have shown that only 5 percent of papers in top journals study low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), and research output is...
Blog Post
August 15, 2023
Everyone agrees that Ghana's school feeding programme is an important and useful social programme…but insufficient and poor quality food is compromising its impacts; government financing remains a challenge; and it lacks lacks broader support and accountability mechanisms. The programme has huge pot...
WORKING PAPERS
August 09, 2023
Can at-scale, government-implemented parent training programs improve parenting practices and child development outcomes? This paper presents evidence on the effects of a low-cost, group-based early childhood education program that provided parent training and direct child stimulation in rural commu...
Blog Post
August 07, 2023
As Lao Tsu put it a couple of thousand years ago, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” One of those single steps in the journey towards a quality education—the goal of the fourth Sustainable Development Goal—is children simply attending school. While attending school regularly ...
Blog Post
August 01, 2023
There’s a lot out there on how to improve educational outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. On the one hand, one may be tempted to lean into Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg’s critique: “There are so many ‘facts’ now available about how to fix education, that anyone…can easily gravita...
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...