C. Journal articles published externally
2,064 items available
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These are journal articles by World Bank authors published externally.
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Publication
Factors Associated with Educational and Career Aspirations of Young Women and Girls in Sierra Leone
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-09-05)Empirical data on the aspirations of young women and girls in post-conflict settings are scarce. This article analyses the factors associated with the educational and career aspirations of 2,473 young women and girls in Sierra Leone. Findings indicated that over three-quarters of our sample aspired to continue their studies up to the university level, and two-thirds aspired to obtain a formal sector job requiring an education. These findings are important for discussions of aid which can accelerate economic advances and opportunities within advanced economies for both women and men. -
Publication
How Well Do Catholic and Other Faith-Based Schools Serve the Poor? A Study with Special Reference to Africa: Part I -- Schooling
(Taylor and Francis, 2019-02-22)Serving the poor is a prime component of the mission of Catholic and many other faith-based schools. Do the schools succeed in doing so? This paper and a companion paper focusing on learning aim to answer this question. In this paper, the focus is on schooling or enrolment in school. The paper considers first global and regional data on the number of students in Catholic preschools and nurseries, primary schools, and secondary schools. The data suggest that Catholic schools are located proportionately more in low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. However, having schools in low income countries does not guarantee that they serve disadvantaged children. Relying on household survey data from Africa, the second part of the analysis suggests that while Catholic and other faith-based schools reach many children in poverty, they often serve children from better off households proportionately more. The last part of the paper considers the constraints faced by Catholic and other faith-based schools in reaching the poor. Some constraints are shared with other types of schools, but others are peculiar to Catholic and faith-based schools, especially in terms of the funding from households that they need to operate given no or only limited state support. -
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Job Autonomy and Education-Skill Matches of Immigrant Workers in Germany
(Taylor and Francis, 2019)This letter examines the determinants of occupational autonomy and education-skill matches of immigrant workers in Germany. Their jobs are characterized by much lower autonomy than those of comparable natives and the immigrant penalty decreases only minimally over time. In contrast to wages, the difference between immigrants from advanced and non-advanced countries is small. But immigrants from advanced countries are much more likely to have a job matching their qualification. The probability of a match does not increase over time for highly educated immigrants, but does for others. Highly educated immigrant women have an additional disadvantage. In some industries low autonomy and skill downgrading of immigrant workers are particularly common. -
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Inequality of Educational Opportunity: The Relationship between Access, Affordability, and Quality of Private Schools in Lagos, Nigeria
(Taylor and Francis, 2018)Using data from a census of private schools in one of Lagos, Nigeria’s administrative jurisdictions, this paper explores the linkages between a heterogeneous sector of private schools and issues of school access, affordability, quality, and ultimately social mobility for households at the bottom of the income distribution. Although a large private education market has buoyed Lagos’s growth towards near-universal primary enrolment, this heterogeneous school sector appears to be providing socially stratifying paths towards educational attainment. We apply Lucas’s theory of effectively maintained inequality to assess the extent to which access to higher quality education services within the private sector is determined by cost. We find that higher-cost private schools provide students with greater opportunities to study in institutions with higher quality inputs and increased potential for progression within the educational system. As such, it is highly likely that these schools are primarily accessible to students at the upper ends of the income distribution. -
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Community Monitoring Interventions to Curb Corruption and Increase Access and Quality in Service Delivery: A Systematic Review
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-09-27)There is a belief that allowing communities monitoring power over providers could be beneficial for improving service delivery and reducing corruption in service delivery. In community monitoring interventions (CMIs), the community is given the opportunity to observe and assess providers’ performance and provide feedback to providers and politicians. This systematic review and meta-analysis appraises and synthesises evidence on the effects of CMIs on access and quality of service delivery and corruption outcomes in low and middle-income countries. The results indicate evidence of beneficial effects of CMIs on service delivery quality and on helping to curb corruption. The potential benefits of CMIs on access to and quality of services are likely to be higher when interventions are designed so that contact between both actors are promoted, and tools for citizens to monitor agents’ performance are provided. However, more rigorous research is needed to address this hypothesis. -
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Egypt: Inequality of Opportunity in Education
(Taylor and Francis, 2017-03-17)The paper examines the levels and trends in access to education and educational outcomes across generations of Egyptian youth. Examination of four cohorts of individuals aged 25–29 shows that, although basic education has democratized, some inequities in access to general secondary and college education have persisted over the past 25 years. The analysis of test scores from TIMSS and national examinations in the late 2000s shows that more than a quarter of learning outcome inequality is attributable to circumstances beyond the control of a student, such as parental education, socioeconomic background, and birthplace. The high level of overall achievement inequality observed makes inequities in learning opportunities between Egyptian youth high compared to other countries in absolute levels. Moreover, learning gaps among pupils from different backgrounds appear at early grades. High and unequal levels of household expenditures in private tutoring and tracking into vocational and general secondary schools that depend on high stakes examination substantially contribute to unequal learning outcomes. -
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Preschool Education in Brazil: Does Public Supply Crowd Out Private Enrollment?
(Elsevier, 2016-02)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. -
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Exploring Women’s Agency and Empowerment in Developing Countries: Where Do We Stand?
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-10-27)While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimensionality mean that the interpretation of results is not always straightforward. -
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Economic Impacts of Child Marriage: A Review of the Literature
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-10-23)Child marriage is a widespread violation of human rights. It is an impediment to social and economic development, and it is rooted in gender inequality. The low value placed on girls and women perpetuates the act and acceptability of child marriage in societies where the practice is common. Child marriage is defined as any legal or customary union involving a boy or girl below the age of 18. This definition draws from various conventions, treaties and international agreements, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and recent resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council. While boys sometimes marry young, this paper addresses the practice primarily as it affects girls who make up the large majority of children who are married under 18. If current trends continue, more than 140 million girls will marry early in the next decade or up to 40,000 per day. -
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Exploring the Differential Impact of Public Interventions on Indigenous People: Lessons from Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfers Program
(Taylor and Francis, 2015-09-22)This paper uses experimental panel data for Mexico from 1997 to 2000 in order to test assumptions on the impact of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program on child labor and school attendance, adding to the literature by emphasizing the differential impact on indigenous households. Using data from the CCT program, PROGRESA (later on known as OPORTUNIDADES), we investigate the interaction between child labor, education and indigenous households. While indigenous children had a greater probability of working before the intervention, this probability is reversed after treatment in the program. Indigenous monolingual children also had lower school attainment compared with Spanish-speaking or indigenous bilingual children. After the program, school attainment among indigenous children increased, reducing the gap. In terms of child labor, the larger reduction is in the group of bilingual children.