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• This paper estimates the effect of immigrant networks on education of school-age Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. • Salvadoran immigrants exposed to a larger network complete fewer years of schooling after arriving to the United States. • Immigrants may face a distorted trade-off between studying and working when exposed to large immigrant networks. • Young immigrants may decide to not go to school if they are exposed to a network that offers them low-skill jobs. This paper estimates the effect of immigrant networks on the education of school-age Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. I construct an instrument for the network size in the U.S. using previous settlement patterns and municipality-level push factors in El Salvador such as crime, agricultural land use, and economic development. I find that Salvadoran immigrants lose half a year of education when their network size exogenously increases by 1 standard deviation (4.7% decrease). Causal links between the education decisions of immigrants and their network may partly explain the low level of education attained by new young immigrants. Immigrants with more education may assimilate better into their host countries and contribute to their economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forcible displacement of children disrupts their social capital, and education is of primary importance regarding their integration into the host communities. Millions of individuals found themselves on the "wrong side" of the border when British India was Partitioned purely along religious lines in 1947, leading to mass-scale violence and migration. These migrants received very little state support because the host states were severely resource-constrained, but they were treated as citizens of the newly formed states. In this paper, I combine survey data with digitized archives of historical census data to study the effect of this large-scale permanent displacement event on the human capital attainment of forcibly displaced children. I use a cohort-age based differences-in-differences approach to show that individuals of school-going age, who were born in India and migrated to Pakistan, have a higher likelihood of completing primary and secondary education than natives in the same birth cohorts. I show that migrants' initial choices regarding location and occupation are two important potential mechanisms that point towards the existence of the "uprootedness hypothesis". My findings provide important insights for the integration of migrants into the host communities and underscore the need to better understand the comparative efficacy of different methods used for supporting forcibly displaced communities. • Forced migrants may achieve their educational goals despite limited state support. • Permanently displaced children outperform natives in their birth cohorts. • The effectiveness of aid compared to that of security of status needs research. • Forced Migrants' changed preferences towards human capital is an important mechanism. • Constrained access to land-based assets might have led to increased education attainment in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America's worst drought spanned the 1930s, coinciding with the most extensive environmental migration in United States history. Nearly 100 years later, we know little about who moved and who stayed. This paper studies heterogeneity in migration from drought by relating migration decisions recorded in the 1940 census to county drought conditions. Drought increased migration primarily for individuals with a 12th-grade education or higher. Drought migrants, both women and men, left rural and urban locations and most often relocated to rural destinations. These findings highlight the importance of individual-level characteristics for adaptation to climate shocks, challenge the perception that rural-to-urban is the dominant environmental migrant channel, and document the central importance of drought for internal migration during the 1930s. • Drought increased migration primarily among highly educated individuals, highlighting different responses by individual human capital. • Drought-induced selection occurred across demographics, including sex and urban status, indicating a broad pattern of increased selection. • Migrants from drought areas mostly relocated to rural locations, challenging the typical rural-to-urban environmental migrant narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Household resilience to food insecurity can be considered as the capacity that ensures stressors and shocks do not have long-lasting adverse development consequences; it is, nowadays, one of the key words in the policy debate on development. Measuring resilience capacity and how it varies over time is extremely significant for policy makers and people living in risk-prone environments. More specifically, there is a gap of empirical evidence about what drives changes in resilience capacity status (i.e. moving from a low resilience profile to a high one, and viceversa). This paper applies econometric techniques for estimating household resilience and adopts transition matrices to estimate how it changes over time. Finally, multinomial logit and bivariate probit models are estimated to identify the main drivers of change. Our study finds that female headed households are less likely to become the most resilient; also this paper demonstrates that education and participation to household enterprises are positively associated with increased resilience capacity. This paper innovates the resilience literature by providing an evidence based analysis of the main drivers of resilience; it brings this evidence in the Uganda’s context, focusing the attention of the policy makers on sub-sample of population which are worse off. More generally, our study suggests that resilience enhancing policies can bridge humanitarian and development interventions by demonstrating how long-term perspectives (i.e. those investing in education) can lead to an immediate increase of resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary When it comes to the state’s ability to deliver services to the poor, politics matter. This paper applies a political settlements framework to examine primary education quality in Rwanda. Formal education features prominently into the post-genocide government’s social and economic development project. Rwanda’s political elite have staked their claim in the development of the country, one which is relatively free from rent-seeking. But education quality remains surprisingly low. Enrollment has surged, but primary school dropout and repetition are high. Most children have not acquired age-appropriate literacy or numeracy skills. We sought to investigate why the education sector hasn’t done better in terms of improving quality than we might have expected. This paper draws from interviews and literature review to investigate how policy development and implementation shape the provision of quality education. Our study finds that education priorities were as much political as they were developmental. A lack of real opposition or pushback enabled the government to introduce profoundly transformative educational policies, such as switching the language of instruction from French to English. Often these decisions occurred outside the sector’s strategic planning processes. Performance-based incentives tended to focus on aspects of quality that are measurable, such as the construction of classrooms, rather than improving the capacity of the teaching workforce. We did not find evidence of an effective, sustained strategy to improve education quality. It is thus debatable to what extent Rwanda’s approach can be considered as inclusive development when quality for most children remains so low. This study makes an empirical contribution through evaluating how the education sector has been situated within Rwanda’s broader political settlement, what kinds of outcomes it has led to, and why. It also makes a theoretical contribution by understanding the nature of the relationship between the national political settlement and the education sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary It is well-documented that early-life outcomes can have lasting impacts during adulthood. This paper investigates two of the main potential channels—childhood health and schooling outcomes—through which the Eritrean–Ethiopian war may have long-term economic impacts. Using unique child-level panel data from Ethiopia, identification is based on a difference-in-difference approach, using two points in time at which older and younger children have the same average age and controlling for observable household and child-level time-variant characteristics. The paper contributes to an empirical literature that relies predominantly on cross-sectional comparisons of child cohorts born before and after the war in war-affected and unaffected regions. The results show that war-exposed children have a one-third of a standard deviation lower height-for-age z-score and a 12-percentage point higher incidence of childhood stunting. In addition, exposed children are less likely to be enrolled in school, complete fewer grades (given enrollment), and are more likely to exhibit reading problems (given enrollment). While analyzing the exact mechanisms is challenging, suggestive evidence indicates that child health reduces child education, in particular the probability of child enrollment at school. These are disconcerting findings, as early-life outcomes can have lasting impacts during adulthood. Future research that focuses on mechanisms through which war affects children may improve the design of appropriate policies that aim to target and support children confronted with war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Effective evidence-based policy making in development requires rigorous measurement of costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important challenges and relevant solutions for implementing cost-effectiveness analysis and comparing the relative cost-effectiveness of programs across settings in the context of education. Adapting development programs from one context to another requires many assumptions. Most of the discussion of those assumptions, to date, has focused on the context-specificity (or external validity) of impact estimates. This study examines the sensitivity of cost-effectiveness analysis to errors in impact estimates, as well as the sensitivity of costs to context, and explores how biases such as recall and pilot bias may lead to over- or under-estimates of cost-effectiveness. We use data on the cost-effectiveness of 27 student learning programs and 16 attendance-boosting programs across Africa and Asia to demonstrate the magnitude of these challenges, as well as potential solutions. We show that comparing Monte Carlo simulations of cost-effectiveness to certain benchmarks and adapting the largest cost elements to local prices (i.e., parameter variation analysis) can remove much of the uncertainty surrounding cost-effectiveness estimates, and we propose that biases can be minimized through the use of detailed templates for cost reporting at the time of program implementation. Thus, this paper not only provides evidence of previously neglected challenges for cost-effectiveness analysis, but – more importantly – provides practical recommendations for undertaking this crucial stage in development planning well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper surveys the literature which examines the effect of education on economic growth. Specifically, we apply meta-regression analysis to 57 studies with 989 estimates and show that there is substantial publication selection bias toward a positive impact of education on growth. Once we account for this, the genuine growth effect of education is not homogeneous across studies, but varies according to several factors. Specifically, it is attributed to differences in education measurement and study characteristics, mainly model specification as well as type of data used, and the quality of research outlets where studies are published, e.g., academic journals vs. working papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper studies the impact of gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International (IPUMS-I) database. Using an estimation method analogous to difference-in-differences, the paper finds that gender-based differences in literacy, primary school completion, and secondary school completion are larger for minority ethnic groups compared to others, or ethnicity-based differences are larger for women compared to men. The findings suggest that the intersection of gender and ethnicity confers cumulative disadvantage for minority groups, especially in Latin American countries, with implications on the design of development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We argue that national networks facilitated cooperation between actors in colonial empires, especially governments and mission societies. • Unlike their non-British counterparts, British mission societies expanded education more in British colonies than elsewhere. • Findings are supported by novel primary data that captures educational activities of mission societies in interwar Africa. • National networks should receive more attention in studies on the history and legacy of colonialism. Colonial Africa was shaped by a variety of European actors. Of foremost importance in the educational sector were both colonial governments and Christian mission societies. While their activities and long-term implications are often analyzed in isolation, few systematic studies investigate relationships between them. However, it is well-known that underfunded colonial governments supported mission societies, who used schools to attract new converts, as low-cost educational providers. In this paper, we argue that mission societies that shared national ties with colonial governments benefitted from increased support and engaged in more extensive educational activities. Using new historical data on Protestant mission societies from the interwar period in Africa, we demonstrate that national alignment between mission societies and colonizer's identity in British Africa was associated with more primary schools and higher enrolment. We discuss and explore potential channels underlying this dynamic, including financial support for missionary activities as well as the granting of access to more favourable locations. Our findings show that national networks are an important but understudied aspect of colonial empires. Furthermore, analyzing the early expansion of education provides insights on the causal links often assumed by studies focused exclusively on long-term effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Gender affects household spending in two areas that have been widely studied in the literature. One strand documents that greater female bargaining power within households results in a variety of shifts in household production and consumption. One important source of bargaining power is ownership of assets, especially land. Another strand examines the gender bias in spending on children. This paper addresses both strands simultaneously. In this paper, differences in spending on education are examined empirically, both at the household and individual levels. Results are mixed, though the balance of evidence weighs toward pro-male bias in spending on education at the household level. Results also indicate that the relationship between asset ownership and female bargaining power within the household are contingent on the type of asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We study the impact of improved land rights on children's schooling in Ethiopia. • Improved land rights decrease grade progress of oldest sons (likely to inherit) • School enrollment improves for all in the zone with fertile land. • School enrollment improves for oldest sons in the more draught-prone zone. Abstract Strong property rights have often been assigned a crucial role in economic development. Land certification programs are one way to address the problem of weak property rights. This paper investigates the impact of a rural land certification program on schooling in two zones of the Amhara region of Ethiopia. This is the first study on impacts of land titling on children's schooling and labor in a rural context. Since land is productive in rural areas the impact could differ from in an urban context. Using the variation in the timing of the arrival of the program at the local level, we investigate the link between land tenure security, schooling and child labor. The results show a positive effect of improved land rights on school enrollment for all children in one of the zones studied, and for oldest sons in the other. Grade progress of oldest sons, who are most likely to inherit the land, worsens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that ethnic diversity negatively influences public goods provision through a longitudinal study of the Indian state of Kerala, which has attained exceptional levels of social development despite high fragmentation along religious and caste lines. This paper argues that it is not objective diversity but a subjective sense of “we-ness,” which is the key determinant of the level of public goods provision and social development. A historical analysis of Kerala illustrates how a cohesive subnational community generates progressive social policy as well as societal monitoring of schools and clinics, which together give rise to relatively high levels of education and health outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper studies the role of non-cognitive skills like self-efficacy in explaining the education and employment aspirations and outcomes of adolescent and young women in Jharkhand, India. We find that self-efficacy is an important correlate of the educational and employment aspirations of these women, and ultimately, of their actual attainments. This suggests that such “hidden” forms of human capital may serve as critical targets for interventions aimed at altering young women’s educational and economic trajectories. We also examine factors that correlate with young women’s level of self-efficacy, and find that an “enabling” and supportive family and community environment appears to be important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper revisits the recent debate on the determinants of long-run economic growth with the simple idea that different factors matter at different country groups classified by income levels. This paper improves on the methodology by conducting not only cross-section estimations but also fixed-effects panel and system-GMM estimations. The results suggest that new policy variables such as technology and tertiary education, as well as institutions, matter as the determinants of long-run economic growth. In addition, this paper finds that while secondary education and institution turn out to be important for lower-income countries, an emphasis on technology and higher education appears to be effective in generating growth for the upper middle- and high-income countries but not for the lower middle and low-income countries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The effects of decentralization on public sector outputs are much debated but little agreed upon. This paper compares the remarkable case of Bolivia with the more complex case of Colombia to explore decentralization’s effects on public education outcomes. In Colombia, decentralization of education finance improved enrollment rates in public schools. In Bolivia, decentralization made government more responsive by re-directing public investment to areas of greatest need. In both countries, investment shifted from infrastructure to primary social services. In both, it was the behavior of smaller, poorer, more rural municipalities that drove these changes. A key innovation of this paper is a methodology for estimating the effects of decentralization in a data-poor environment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper analyzes rights-based and economic approaches to the provision of health care and education in developing countries. It assesses the foundations and uses of social rights in development, outlines the economic approach to health care and education, highlights differences and similarities, and assesses the hard questions that the economic critique poses for rights. The paper argues that the policy consequences of the approaches overlap considerably. Differences include the consequences of long-term deprivation, metrics for tradeoffs, and the behavioral distortions of subsidies. But the differences are not irreconcilable, and advocates of the approaches need not regard each other as antagonists. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we explore the conditions of childhood that can lead to poverty throughout the lifecourse and affect transfers of poverty to the next generation. The largely inconclusive evidence base surrounding lifecourse and intergenerational poverty transmission is reviewed before a discussion of the key social processes and contexts that impact on childhood, lifecourse and intergenerational poverty. Prioritized issues––nutrition, childcare and guidance, education, child work, and aspirations and attitudes––are explored within the context of UNICEF’s basic framework of survival, protection, development and participation. The paper concludes with an analysis of elements of the wider environment, critical to enabling action in childhood to break poverty cycles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Attainment in school and enrollment in post-compulsory education are lower for males compared to females in Sri Lanka. • Implicit biases favour girls with parental aspirations and teacher attitudes higher for girls than boys. • Gaps in maths scores at age 12 are explained by differences in returns to endowments rather than differences in endowments. • Earnings foregone are more significant in males' decision to enroll compared to females', even when controlled for wealth. • Positive discrimination of males in the labour market may explain poor attainment at the school level. An increasingly common trend in developed countries and middle income countries such as Thailand, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka is that females outperform males in terms of attainment at school and enrollment in higher education, on average. Surprisingly, in countries such as Sri Lanka and Thailand, households also seem to allocate significantly higher resources towards girls' education rather than boys' (Himaz, 2010; Wongmonta & Glewwe, 2017). This paper looks at attainment in mathematics among a sample of 12 year olds in Sri Lanka and uses decomposition analysis to see to what extent parental aspirations and teacher attitudes, inter alia , can explain gender differentials disfavoring boys. The paper finds that although teacher attitudes and parental aspirations are significantly lower for boys, these factors -as we measure them- do not sufficiently explain the attainment gap. Much of the gap remains 'unexplained' and is due to differences in returns to endowments. The paper argues that positive discrimination of men in the labor market and bottle necks in higher-education may be important in understanding the unexplained component. This emphasizes the need to look beyond school level interventions to address the issue of gender imbalances in attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers are frequently characterized as being out of touch with the communities they serve. But closing the “gap” between policy makers and people is not straightforward, since distancing effects are produced by a combination of geography, politics and knowledge. This article analyses the case of an experimental initiative in Bangladesh known as the “reality check” that attempted to influence policy makers in the health and education sectors by providing them with people-centered data gathered at community level. The case is analyzed as an example of “methodological populism” that combined participatory and ethnographic approaches, and as one that challenged current managerialist cultures of what can be considered as acceptable evidence for policy. The case highlights tensions between participation, populism and policy that are potentially productive but constrained by three sets of factors: (i) contestations over the status of “popular knowledge”, (ii) the need for critical “policy spaces” within policy processes in which policy makers can engage with such knowledge, and (iii) the “disruptive temporalities” within policy processes that tend to inhibit learning. Drawing on the “guarded hopefulness” of meta-modernist theory, the paper concludes that if more attention can be paid to such issues, initiatives informed by methodological populism such as the reality check could be further built upon in ways that may contribute to the humanization or “peopling” of policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shifts the focus from building individual capacities to understanding the relational acts through which empowerment and education acquire their value and meaning. Conceptually, the paper employs social cognitive theory to explore the interplay between social learning, relational agency, and culture. This interplay builds the foundation for the development of an empowerment model of capacity building that proposes an interlinked system of community capacity and empowerment dimensions. The model is explored in the context of the Education for All project in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The research combines participant observation, qualitative interviews and visual methods to provide rich insights to situated knowledges of learning and empowerment. Findings reveal that the meaning of education equates to the capacity to aspire to a different life. This problematizes the way gender and gender relations are understood in the rural Berber villages. The girls’ education unsettles the repeating cycle of female educational deprivation, and leads them to become role models within their communities. This instills the image of educated women in community consciousness, leading to an incipient change in perceptions of what girls and women can be and do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universal school enrolment of children aged 6–14 years has been a commitment enshrined in the Indian constitution since 1950. To attain this goal, the central government has set up a range of programs, such as incentive programs, teacher grants and infrastructure grants, while state governments share responsibility in implementing those educational policy initiatives. This paper reviews the progress of India’s primary schools over the period 2005–2011 as public educational undertaking shifted more from the centre to the states. Using two waves of the Indian Human Development Survey conducted in 2005 and 2011, we track the progress of primary schools in terms of infrastructure upgrade, teachers’ quality, the costs of education, enrolment and learning outcomes. We find that while progress has been made in terms of infrastructure provision and enrolment, other aspects have either seen no progress or have worsened over time, and numerical and reading skills of children 8–11 years old worsening over time. Better performing states are generally in the South and in the extreme North. However, in terms of learning outcomes, the abysmal results are nationwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Despite significant efforts, Africa has struggled to imitate the rapid agricultural growth that took place in Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. As a rare but important exception, Ethiopia’s agriculture sector recorded remarkable rapid growth during 2004–14. This paper explores this rapid change in the agriculture sector of this important country – the second most populous in Africa. We review the evidence on agricultural growth and decompose the contributions of modern inputs to growth using an adjusted Solow decomposition model. We also highlight the key pathways Ethiopia followed to achieve its agricultural growth. We find that land and labor use expanded significantly and total factor productivity grew by about 2.3% per year over the study period. Moreover, modern input use more than doubled, explaining some of this growth. The expansion in modern input use appears to have been driven by high government expenditures on the agriculture sector, including agricultural extension, but also by an improved road network, higher rural education levels, and favorable international and local price incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries despite substantial improvements in education levels and economic development. One potential explanation for the persistence of this phenomenon is that individual household members like the mother derive large non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son and therefore prefer boys to girls. Qualitative evidence suggests that such benefits exist and may depend on the child’s age. This paper uses large nationally representative datasets from India and tests whether having a son leads to higher decision-making powers for mothers than having a daughter. Since the number and gender composition of children is likely to be non-random for families that want a son, I focus on first-born children for whom the sex ratio of girls relative to boys is normal. The main analysis also focuses on young children of up to six months, which gives parents little time to adjust desired birth-spacing intervals that could be systematically correlated with decision-making powers and child gender. The results show little evidence of consistently large female benefits shortly after birth, and any positive impacts of having a son disappear after the first six months. There are also no large benefits for adult sons. These empirical patterns do not support qualitative evidence suggesting that women benefit from the birth of a son through larger decision-making powers in the household because of increased respect by other household members. The benefits also do not heavily depend on the child’s age, which is not consistent with a channel predicting a better bargaining position for women with adult sons who start taking over the running of the household. Overall, these results extend our understanding of individual-specific incentives for son preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender discrimination within the household exists in many contexts. In societies where the norm is to not expect future support from daughters, parents may invest even less in the health and human capital of girls. In India, as in other patriarchal societies, the eldest son occupies a special position as the potential head of the extended family and is expected to assume responsibility for parents' welfare in their old age. In this paper, I explore intra-household differences in educational expenditure and enrollment for children by gender and birth order. Using child level data from the nationally representative India Human Development Survey-II (2011–12), I confirm the presence of a pro-male bias and an additional preference for the eldest son. In families with more children and greater competition for resources within the household, the pro-male bias falls and the bias in favor of the eldest son is greater. Parents in the higher income bracket, who are also less likely to be dependent on their children, discriminate less in favor of the eldest son. As expected, pro-male bias is highest in the north, central and eastern zones of the country. The north-eastern zone exhibits the lowest levels of intra household discrimination based on gender. Finally, I find evidence suggesting reverse discrimination, i.e. discrimination against sons, in the state of Meghalaya which follows a rare matrilineal system where the youngest daughter takes over as the head of the household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The relationship between rural household productive assets and child labor in developing countries is complex. Some empirical evidence shows that child labor tends to increase as land holding increases, or there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between the probability of putting children to work and land holding. This paper shows that the relationship between use of children as laborers and land holding is nuanced. Child labor generally decreases as per capita land holding increases, but there can be an upward bump in the relationship between child labor and landholding near the middle of the range of land per capita. The bump can be explained theoretically by the relationship between the marginal productivity of a child worker on the farm and the marginal value placed on his/her education at different levels of wealth. This pattern is repeated in three surveys conducted in Zimbabwe, in 2001, 2007–8, and 2010–11. From the perspective of policy making, the policy maker should be alerted that the programs to promote school retention should not necessarily focus only on the poorest households in rural areas. There is a high probability that middle-wealth households put their children to work, and this probability may change by some other factors such as gender of child and agro-ecological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Few empirical studies focused on the role of officials in the anticorruption enforcement, especially in the authoritarian regime. This paper uses linear panel data models with various control variables to investigate how the power of the government official in an anticorruption agency may impact the effectiveness of anticorruption campaign in China. Two types of political power are considered. Formal power is obtained when the Discipline Inspection Secretary is also named as a Vice Party Secretary of the province whereas informal power arises when the Secretary used to work with the Party Secretary of the province. It is found that both the formal and informal power of the Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party’s Discipline Inspection Commission (i.e., the head of the anticorruption agency) help enhance the number of corruption cases under investigation. This result offers evidence to further explore how and why the anticorruption enforcement officials play their roles in a developing transitional country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many African countries are both consolidating their democratic institutions and continuing to expand mass primary schooling. In this context, citizens may be interested in the broad general effect of education on political engagement. Recent social science work estimating this effect has not arrived at consensus, with researchers suggesting the relationship may be context dependent, and could vary from positive to negative. We apply an instrumental variable (IV) approach, using Afrobarometer surveys in Burkina Faso over the 2008–2019 period, merged with data on the timing of school establishment at the village level. Individual schooling attainment is instrumented by whether a school was established in the village of residence when the person was seven years old. The data is finer than recent papers that estimate the relationship using national-level quasi-experiments where education access changed across birth cohorts or where an indirect proxy measure of education access varied across regions and birth cohorts. We find that the relationship appears to differ by gender: men exhibit a substantial negative effect of education on engagement, while women exhibit no sizable relationship. The null effect for women may be due to low power, as there is less variation in education outcomes for women in rural areas. The results suggest that gender may be an important mediator of the direction and magnitude of the complex relationship between education and political engagement in polities with low overall levels of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper re-examines the sources of inequality in Vietnam, a transitional economy with large reductions in poverty from recent and dramatic economic growth, but vastly unequal gains across ethnic groups. Using a decomposition approach to disentangle factor endowments and returns by ethnic group, we draw four key conclusions. First, removing language barriers would significantly reduce inequality among ethnic groups, narrowing the ethnic gap, and especially so through enhancing the gains earned by minorities from education. Second, variations in returns to education exist in favor of the majority in mixed communes, suggesting that either the special needs of minority children have not been adequately addressed in the classroom, or unequal treatment in favor of the majority exists in the labor market. Third, in contrast to recent literature, there is no difference in the benefits drawn from enhanced infrastructure at the commune level across ethnic groups. Finally, we find little evidence to support the established views that the ethnic gap is attributed largely to differences in the returns to endowments. Overall, our research highlights the importance of considering language barriers and the availability of infrastructure for ethnic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This study aims at understanding the role of education in promoting disaster preparedness. Strengthening resilience to climate-related hazards is an urgent target of Goal 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals. Preparing for a disaster such as stockpiling of emergency supplies or having a family evacuation plan can substantially minimize loss and damages from natural hazards. However, the levels of household disaster preparedness are often low even in disaster-prone areas. Focusing on determinants of personal disaster preparedness, this paper investigates: (1) pathways through which education enhances preparedness; and (2) the interplay between education and experience in shaping preparedness actions. Data analysis is based on face-to-face surveys of adults aged ≥15 years in Thailand ( N = 1,310) and the Philippines ( N = 889, female only). Controlling for socio-demographic and contextual characteristics, we find that formal education raises the propensity to prepare against disasters. Using the KHB method to further decompose the education effects, we find that the effect of education on disaster preparedness is mainly mediated through social capital and disaster risk perception in Thailand whereas there is no evidence that education is mediated through observable channels in the Philippines. This suggests that the underlying mechanisms explaining the education effects are highly context-specific. Controlling for the interplay between education and disaster experience, we show that education raises disaster preparedness only for those households that have not been affected by a disaster in the past. Education improves abstract reasoning and anticipation skills such that the better educated undertake preventive measures without needing to first experience the harmful event and then learn later. In line with recent efforts of various UN agencies in promoting education for sustainable development, this study provides a solid empirical evidence showing positive externalities of education in disaster risk reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary In this paper, we consider whether it is the gender of the decision maker or the extent of agency that they wield that is crucial to increasing household welfare. This is an important question as development policy is often formed on the basis that placing resources in the hands of women results in greater household welfare. Indonesia provides the ideal opportunity to study this issue because it is home to ethnic groups with very different gender norms from male dominance (the patrilineal Batak) to female dominance (the matrilineal Minangkabau). Using IFLS data for three rounds, we consider the impact of decision-making by the dominant spouse on household expenditure on education. We find that, in Indonesia, when the dominant spouse (male or female) has sole control of decision-making, there is an overall negative impact on education expenditure. This leads us to argue that it is more important to consider the issue of spousal dominance, than to wholly focus on gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Rapidly decreasing gender gaps in schooling in some developing countries can be partly explained by a gendered division of child farm labor as a coping response to natural disasters. This paper makes a case for this conjecture by analyzing original household survey data from rural Fiji. Boys, not girls, contribute to farming only among cyclone victims with dwelling damage, independent of housing-aid receipt. Boys’ school enrollment is significantly lower than girls’ only among victims who did not receive aid early enough. Boys with no elder brother and an educated father are particularly vulnerable in their progression to higher level schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper analyzes the evolution of the effects on educational inequality of early marriage by looking at the impact of whether women had married young on their children’s schooling outcomes for 25–32 countries (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 2000 and 2010 for Sub-Saharan Africa. We also explore indirect pathways—mother’s education, health, and empowerment as well as community channels—operating from early marriage to child schooling and assess the presence of negative externalities for non-early married mothers and their children on education transmission in communities with large rates of child marriage. In our econometric analysis we employ OLS, matching, instrumental variables, and pseudo-panel for a better understanding of changes over time. Our results show that early marriage is still a significant source of inequality, though its impact has decreased across time: girls born to early married mothers are between 6% and 11% more likely to never been to school and 1.6% and 1.7% to enter late, and 3.3% and 5.1% less likely to complete primary school, whereas boys are between 5.2% and 8.8% more likely to never been to school and 1% and 1.9% to enter late, and 2.3% and 5.5% less likely to complete primary school. Second, child marriage increases gender inequality within household’s with girls losing an additional 0.07 years of schooling as compared to boys if born to early married mothers. Third, our estimates show that mother’s education and health mediate some of the effect of early marriage and that the large prevalence of child marriage in a community also impairs educational transmission for non-early married mothers. Fourth, empowering of young wives can weaken other channels of transmission of education inequalities. Overall, our findings highlight the need to target these children with the appropriate interventions and support to achieve the greater focus on equity in the global post-2015 education agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Alongside its detrimental macroeconomics impacts, financial crises can have substantial negative consequences on human and social wellbeing. Employing a cross-country dataset on more than 100 banking and/or currency crises during 1981–2007, this work examines the effects of financial crises on indicators of human and social wellbeing. Through employing an event study analysis, the findings of this analysis suggest that the aftermaths of financial crises are characterized by increases in the growth rates of suicide rates, crime rates, and income inequality rates relative to their pre-crisis trajectories. Additionally, declines in the growth rates of health and educational expenditures, government welfare expenditures, and food quality and quantity intakes are common during periods immediately following financial crises. Such deteriorations are observed across different countries with income levels and also for crises that are and are not accompanied by recessions. On average, though, human and social indicators are hit harder during financial crisis events accompanied by recessions. This is especially true for crises in low- and middle-income economies in comparison to those in high-income countries. As a result, not only are financial crises directly responsible for more rapid increases in income inequality within countries; they may also be responsible for increasing inequalities of income, security, health, nutrition, and educational outcomes between richer and poorer countries. Needless to say, deteriorations in many of these fronts are often associated with persistent or permanent losses in human and social wellbeing and cannot be assumed to be simply and immediately reversed with an economic recovery. Therefore, the paper calls on the need for more concerted effort on the part of the policymakers to actively protect human and social outcomes during financial crises, rather than trying to address such losses in the aftermath of crises, because some of these losses are simply not recoverable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• How formal education is designed, redistributed, governed and imposed led to multiple forms of violence against pastoralists in Karamoja. • Formal education justifies and increases processes of stability (e.g. sedentarization) in an environment of high environmental variability. • There is an urgency to rethink the purpose and potential of formal education in contexts of high variability such as Karamoja. • More reflection is needed to consider the harm formal education can cause (and has already caused) to marginalized and non-western societies. • There is a need to build on, expand and re-invest in locally developed, flexible and alternative modes of education. There is a shift from pastoralism towards agro-pastoralism and systematized agricultural production in Karamoja, a sub-region of Uganda. At the same time, aid agencies and the government want to formally educate the Karamojong, in line with global education norms and policies. This creates a lot of ambiguities and in-betweens for the Karamojong as formal education impels sedentarization and socio-economic division. The Karamojong have a long history of using resistance to formal education as a tool to protect their pastoralist lifestyle and cultural values. This paper sheds light on the complex and often violent intersections of modernization, development and formal education. It argues that while formal education has delivered some benefits to the Karamojong, it has also led to multiple forms of violence, aid paradoxes and dead ends. The Karamojong's relationship with formal education is shaped by resistance , cultural repression , irrelevance and structural violence. If pastoralism ought to be invigorated in Karamoja, there is an urgency to rethink the purpose and potential of formal education in the region. This includes to build on, expand and re-invest in locally developed, flexible and alternative learning programmes that are more suited to fit the everyday lives and realities of the Karamojong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We investigate the effect of human capital formation on authoritarian survival. • Government expenditure of education reduces the probability of regime breakdown in dictatorships. • In non-democratic East Asian countries, citizens with more formal education perceived greater social mobility than less educated citizens. • Citizens perceiving higher social mobility are less likely to demand political freedom. This paper examines the logic of human capital formation in authoritarian regimes based on theories of inequality and regime transition and the prospect of upward mobility model. Our central argument is that by investing in human capital, dictators can boost citizens' perceived levels of social mobility. Consequently, dictators can preemptively ameliorate the pressure for redistribution from the poor and neutralize threats from the masses. In other words, dictators invest in human capital as a way of increasing citizens' perceived social mobility and thus sustaining political stability in their authoritarian regimes. Our cross-national analysis covers more than 80 authoritarian regimes from 1970 to 2010 and shows that higher levels of education spending are associated with a lower probability of regime breakdown in autocracies. We further use a causal mediation analysis with the Asian Barometer Survey data and connect our causal link from human capital formation to perceived social mobility and then to authoritarian regime support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Each year around 10,000 African officials are trained in China, across a range of themes. Among these, agriculture and development policy are prominent. In this paper we ask what lies behind this program, and how it fits with wider commercial, diplomatic, and geopolitical ambitions of China in Africa. Through work carried out in China, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, involving attending courses, interviewing participants and lecturers, examining curricula and reviewing policy documents, we assess Chinese agricultural development courses, supported by China’s Ministry of Commerce. Contrary to the argument that a singular “Beijing Consensus” is being pushed, we find a wide range of course offerings from a range of institutions across China, and extensive debate about agricultural development. This reflects the internal Chinese debate, and an approach to development emphasizing demonstration, experiment, and learning. Course participation involves officials from across Africa, and does not correlate with Chinese commercial interests in Africa. Commercial opportunities may be linked to training, and some courses are run by companies, although instances of take-up are few. The overall direct and immediate impact on agricultural development in Africa appears limited; instead the training program must be seen in relation to building relationships among a large group of African officials, and so the exertion of “soft power” in foreign policy, as part of development cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Expanding access to preschool education is a particularly important policy issue in developing countries, where enrollment rates are generally much lower, and where private institutions constitute a much larger share of the formal preschool sector, than in developed countries. This paper examines if an expansion in the supply of public preschool crowds-out private enrollment using rich data for municipalities in Brazil from 2000 to 2006, where federal transfers to local governments change discontinuously with given population thresholds. Results from a regression-discontinuity design reveal that larger federal transfers lead to a significant expansion of local public preschool services, but show no evidence of crowding-out of private enrollment, nor of negative impacts on the quality of private providers. This finding is consistent with a theory in which households differ in willingness-to-pay for preschool services, and private suppliers optimally adjust prices in response to an expansion of lower-quality, free-of-charge public supply. In the context of the model, the absence of crowding-out effects of more public preschool providers can be rationalized by the existence of relatively large differences in willingness-to-pay for preschool services across different demand segments. Our theoretical and empirical findings therefore suggest that in developing country settings characterized by relatively high income inequality, an expansion in public preschool supply will likely significantly increase enrollment among the poorest segments of society, and need not have adverse effects on the quantity or quality of local private supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper investigates the effects of a remedial education program—the Roma Teaching Assistant Program—targeting the socially excluded Roma minority in Serbia. By using first-hand collected data, we find evidence that children exposed to the program went more to school. We do not find an effect on dropouts or marks for all grades. An examination of heterogeneous effects suggests that children in the first grade benefited more from the program as compared to their older peers through lower dropouts and better marks. Overall, our results suggest that well-targeted remedial education programs can boost outcomes of low performers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights a particular mechanism underlying the exclusion process of indigenous people in Peru by analyzing the role of aspirations in educational investment. Relying on the Young Lives dataset, we find that indigenous children do not limit their aspirations when compared to non-indigenous children with the same socio-economic background. Findings suggest that they do not have internalized racial schemas about their opportunities. However, aspirations are a channel of inequality persistence between ethnic groups, exacerbating the effect of socioeconomic status on educational achievement. Indeed, socioeconomic status predicts the level of aspiration which in turn impacts progress in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new method to infer gender preferences from birth spacing. We apply it to Africa, where the least is known about gender preferences. We show that son preference is strong and increasing in North Africa. By contrast, most Sub-Saharan African countries display a preference for variety or no preference at all. Further analysis concludes that traditional family systems predict well the nature of gender preferences, while religion does not. Last, the magnitude of preferences is stronger for wealthier and more educated women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the return to education for entrepreneurs in rural China with a large return migrant survey dataset. By exploiting the unique culture of male dominance in Chinese society, we use women’s education to instrument their husbands’ schooling. The results show that the return to one additional year of schooling ranges between 12.6% and 18.8% for China’s return migrant entrepreneurs, much larger than the estimated returns to education for off-farm wage workers documented in the literature. We also find that the return to education for entrepreneurs who hire paid workers more than doubles that for own-account workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The extensive coverage of household surveys in conflict regions in recent decades has fueled a growing literature on the microeconomic effects of war. In this paper, we use a unique panel dataset to quantify the impact of the Nepalese civil conflict on schooling attainment. Given longitudinal data, we are able to directly estimate unobserved individual heterogeneity and thus address selective wartime displacement. Despite the widely-held view that war is detrimental to human capital formation, we find no effect of war intensity on schooling attainment once unobserved individual heterogeneity is accounted for. We draw on supplementary data to explain our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper examines whether education empowers women. We exploit an exogenous variation in education induced by a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We find education reduces the number of live births, increases contraceptive use, and promotes reproductive health practices. However, except for a few outcome measures, we do not find evidence that education improves women’s decision-making authority within households, asset ownership, or community participation. These results suggest that, to some extent, education does empower women in middle-income countries like Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper explores the effects of a mother’s migration on her children’s well-being. I use children with migrant fathers as the main control group to separately identify the effects coming from remittances from those resulting from parental absence. Exploiting demand shocks as an exogenous source of variation in the probability that the mother migrates, I find suggestive evidence that children of migrant mothers are more likely to lag behind in school compared to children with migrant fathers. Controlling for remittances does not change this result, supporting the hypothesis that a mother’s absence has a stronger detrimental effect than a father’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The absence of a vibrant and job-rich non-farm rural economy limits livelihood options, particularly for low-capability households. • Secondary school completion is beyond the reach of most poor rural children, leaving them with few high-return livelihood options. • Land scarcity, low capabilities and the sluggish non-farm economy lock together to form a nexus limiting sustained escapes from poverty in rural Rwanda. • A high-risk environment, coupled with an as yet ineffective enabling environment, constrains diversification and investment in rural enterprise. Acute land scarcity in Rwanda limits poor people's ability to accumulate and move out of poverty. Options for livelihood diversification are restricted by the absence of a vibrant and job-rich non-farm rural economy, and by high rural–urban inequality which makes the urban economy somewhat inaccessible, particularly given the regulated nature of the urban informal sector, limiting opportunities for migration. Competition for employment is made more challenging by low capabilities, which place high-return jobs beyond reach for many poor people. This paper relies on mixed methods research to explore a land-education-jobs nexus and identify the linked human capital and livelihood determinants of poverty escapes to understand the factors slowing poverty reduction in Rwanda. The quantitative analysis uses three waves of nationally representative panel data between 2010/11 and 2016/17 to investigate correlates of poverty trajectories. The qualitative analysis uses content analysis to explore life histories, focus group discussions and key informant interviews from 14 study sites to explore factors driving change in livelihoods and well-being. Our findings show that the triple challenges of acute land scarcity, low capabilities and a sluggish non-farm economy lock together to form a nexus which limits sustained poverty escapes. In the regression analysis, households headed by primary school graduates are half as likely to be poor as those headed by a primary school dropouts while secondary completion or higher virtually eliminates the risk of poverty. Despite demand, secondary school completion in the fieldwork is beyond the reach of most children from poor households, limiting their later options for livelihood diversification. Near landlessness constrains accumulation and Rwanda's thin rural non-farm economy provides few jobs or opportunities for self-employment. Rebooting poverty reduction in Rwanda particularly following the Covid-19 pandemic will require finding ways to sustain poverty escapes through fuelling job-rich 'growth from below' by generating additional demand in the rural economy, continuing to boost agricultural productivity and including even the poorest peasant farmers in that, creating a more conducive business environment for small enterprises and continuing to stimulate investment in job-rich enterprise. Underpinning these strategies should be strengthened efforts to enhance capabilities, education quality, and progression into secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]