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Poverty and Distributional Impact of Fiscal Policy in Dominican Republic

(Washington, DC, 2023-11-28) World Bank

This report assesses the impact of fiscal policy, both revenue and expenditure, on inequality and poverty in the Dominican Republic. On the revenue side, the analysis focuses on the personal income tax, the value added tax (tax on the transfer of industrialized goods and services, known as ITBIS in the Dominican Republic for its initials in Spanish) and excise taxes on alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, fuel products and telecommunication services. These taxes combined accounted for 7.8 percent of GDP in 2018, equivalent to 60 percent of total tax revenues. On the expenditure side, the analysis focuses on social protection benefits like direct cash and near-cash transfers (e.g., the school food-program and the school uniforms and supplies program), indirect subsidies (energy, water, and public transport), and in-kind benefits on education and health, which together account for 39.2 percent of total government expenditures and 85.9 percent of social expenditures. The remainder of this report is organized as follows: Section II describes the Dominican Republic’s tax systems and government spending in 2018 and compares them with those of selected Latin American countries. Section III includes a description of the data, methodology and assumptions made in carrying out the analysis in this report. The main results are provided in Section IV, starting with fiscal policy’s net impact on inequality, followed by its impact on poverty incidence. A comparison with other countries is then provided. Section IV also includes a detailed analysis of the distributional impact of taxes, social spending, and subsidies, to demonstrate their impact on the welfare of the poor. The report’s main conclusions are presented in Section V.
Making Teacher Policy Work

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-08) World Bank

This report zooms into what lies behind the success or failure of teacher policies: how teachers experience these policies, and how systems scale and sustain these policies. The report argues that for policies to be successful, they need to be designed and implemented with careful consideration of the barriers that could hinder teachers’ take-up of the policy (individual-level barriers), and the barriers that could hinder the implementation and sustainability of policies at scale (system-level barriers). Teacher polices too often fail to yield meaningful changes in teaching and learning because both their design and implementation overlook how teachers perceive, understand, and act in response to the policy and because they miss what is needed at a system level to achieve and sustain change. To avoid this, policymakers need to go beyond what works in teacher policy to how to support teachers in different contexts to adopt what works, while making sure it is implementable at scale and can be sustained over time. This requires unpacking teacher policies to consider the barriers that might hinder success at both the individual and system levels, and then putting in place strategies to overcome these barriers. The report proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability. The framework distills insights from behavioral science to identify the barriers that stand in the way of the changes targeted by the policy and to develop strategies to overcome them. The framework is used to examine questions such as: What changes are required at an individual level to achieve the specific goals of a given teacher policy What barriers constrain the adoption of these changes How can the policy be better designed and implemented to tackle these barriers Moreover, the report draws on evidence from quantitative and qualitative studies on successful and failed teacher policies to examine the factors that make teacher policy operationally and politically feasible such that it can work at scale and be sustained over time.
Internet Access and Use in Latin America and the Caribbean: From the LAC High Frequency Phone Surveys 2021

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) World Bank ; United Nations Development Programme

While most households in Latin America and the Caribbean use mobile broadband via smartphones, expensive fees and poor service quality pose major obstacles for potential users. In addition, power outages are a challenge for nearly 40 percent of existing mobile broadband users. Addressing the region’s need for faster, cheaper, and more reliable internet connections is thus a policy and investment priority. There are persistent and significant gaps in digital infrastructure between countries in the region, as well as weighty rural-urban gaps within some countries. Bridging these digital divides will be key to inclusive digital transformation. Households with tertiary education are on average more connected (with better quality service and higher expenditures on data) compared to the rest of the population. As education level is correlated with income, digital inequalities mirror and may amplify existing social inequalities – underscoring the critical need to address them. Over two-thirds of connected households in the region are concerned about privacy and security when using the internet. However, households on average across Latin America and the Caribbean still reported increasing their use of the internet amid the pandemic, suggesting that neither issue poses a barrier to their internet use at present.
The Learning Crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sobering Results of a Deepening Trend

(Washington, DC, 2022-04) World Bank

The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region was suffering from a deep learning crisis, before the COVID-19 outbreak, with most students being below minimum proficiency levels for critical foundational competencies in numeracy and literacy, according to the Fourth Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (ERCE). The pandemic that hit the region in March 2020 led to a massive shutdown of educational systems, placing LAC as the region with the longest duration of school closures in the world. The impact of school closures on education service delivery was significant. The forced move to distance learning negatively impacted attendance in the education process, both when compared to enrollment rates (-10 percent) and with pre-pandemic attendance rates (-12 percent). Most worryingly, one in four students attending the education process during the pandemic confirmed being disengaged from learning activities while at home. The COVID-19 led to a crisis within a crisis, deepening pre-existing inequalities that characterize the LAC region, as the most vulnerable populations were disproportionately affected. A significant increase in drop-out rates and decrease in learning outcomes is expected, especially for these groups and countries which were already not doing well pre-pandemic. There is a sizeable schooling and learning recovery agenda ahead of LAC, where re-enrollment campaigns, standardized and in-classroom assessments, and programs to teach to the right level will be fundamental to determine the exact depth of educational losses and start recovering.
Reconocimiento y Revalidación en Chile de Títulos Obtenidos en el Extranjero

(Washington, DC, 2022) World Bank

El proceso de reconocimiento y revalidación de títulos y grados académicos es de gran importancia para la inclusión laboral de las personas migrantes en Chile. Un título profesional, técnico-superior o de grado académico faculta a quien lo obtuvo a ejercer la profesión correspondiente. Por lo tanto, el reconocimiento o revalidación de un título de educación superior es de gran importancia para las personas migrantes quienes, habiendo obtenido un título o grado de educación superior (el 26,8% del total de la población migrante) en su país de origen o en otro país, puedan ejercer su profesión en Chile y participar en el mercado laboral desempeñándose acorde a sus habilidades y competencias. Un proceso de reconocimiento y revalidación de credenciales efectivo no solo contribuye a la inserción laboral de quienes migran sino también a la productividad y crecimiento económico del país.
The State of the Global Education Crisis: A Path to Recovery

(UNESCO, Paris, UNICEF, New York, and World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12-10) UNESCO ; UNICEF ; World Bank

Even before Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hit, the world was already experiencing a learning crisis. 258 million primary- and secondary-school age children and youth were out of school. Many children who were in school were learning very little: 53 percent of all ten-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries were experiencing learning poverty, meaning that they were unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text at age 10. This report spotlights how COVID-19 has deepened the education crisis and charts a course for creating more resilient education systems for the future. Section one gives introduction. Section two documents COVID-19’s impacts on learning levels by presenting updated simulations and bringing together the latest documented evidence on learning loss from over 28 countries. Section three explores how the crisis has widened inequality and had greater impacts on already disadvantaged children and youth. Section four reviews evidence on learning recovery from past crises and highlights current policy responses that appear most likely to have succeeded in stemming learning losses, while recognizing that the evidence is still in a nascent stage. The final section discusses how to build on the investments made and the lessons learned during the pandemic to accelerate learning recovery and emerge from the crisis with increased education quality, resilience, and equity in the longer term.
Remarks at the Human Capital Conclave

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-04-05) Malpass, David

David Malpass, President of the World Bank, discussed the importance of investing in human capital for a green, resilient, and inclusive recovery from the Coronavirus disease crisis. He highlighted three important measures: 1) investing in people; 2) efficient expenditures and good governance; and 3) freeing up fiscal space.
Will Every Child Be Able to Read by 2030? Defining Learning Poverty and Mapping the Dimensions of the Challenge: Definición de pobreza de aprendizajes y un mapeo de la magnitud del desafío

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Azevedo, Joao Pedro ; Goldemberg, Diana ; Montoya, Silvia ; Nayar, Reema ; Rogers, Halsey ; Saavedra, Jaime ; Stacy, Brian William

In October 2019, the World Bank and UNESCO Institute for Statistics proposed a new metric, Learning Poverty, designed to spotlight low levels of learning and track progress toward ensuring that all children acquire foundational skills. This paper provides the technical background for that indicator, and for its main findings—first, that even before COVID-19, 53 percent of all children in low- and middle-income countries could not read with comprehension by age 10, and second, that at pre-COVID-19 trends, the Learning Poverty rate was on track to fall only to 44 percent by 2030, far short of the universal literacy envisioned under the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper contributes to the literature in four ways. First, it formally describes the new synthetic Learning Poverty metric, which combines the dimensions of learning with schooling and thus reflects the learning of all children, and it presents, for the first time, standard errors associated with the proposed measure. Second, it documents how this indicator is calculated at the country, regional, and global levels, and discusses the robustness associated with different aggregation approaches. Third, it documents historical rates of progress and compares them with the rate of progress that would be required for countries to halve Learning Poverty by 2030, as envisioned under the learning target announced by the World Bank in 2019. Fourth, it provides heterogeneity analysis by gender, region, and other variables, and documents learning poverty’s strong correlation with metrics of learning for other ages. These results show that the Learning Poverty indicator, together with improved measurement of learning, can be used as an evidence-based tool to promote progress toward all children reading by age 10—a prerequisite for achieving all the ambitious education aspirations included under Sustainable Development Goals 4.
Structuring Effective 1-1 Support: Technical Guidance Note

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021) Wilichowski, Tracy ; Popova, Anna

Teachers in low- and middle-income countries often lack the knowledge to improve student achievement and exhibit weak cognitive skills and ineffective teaching practices. Teacher professional development (TPD) programs that are embedded as part of a larger comprehensive capacity development strategy and include ongoing individualized feedback have shown large positive effects on teachers' instruction, and, subsequently, on student learning outcomes. However, what this comprehensive professional development entails in practice has not been systematically documented. The questions are who in the system is best placed to support teachers; how many teachers should these individuals support; how often should these individuals visit teachers; and how long should these individuals observe and provide feedback. This technical guidance note provides explicit guidance for policymakers on how to structure the delivery of a successful in-service TPD coaching intervention. This note also can be used by Task Team Leaders (TTLs) to establish dialogue with their clients and to inform project preparation and supervision.
Guidance Note on Using Learning Assessment in the Process of School Reopening

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-21) Luna Bazaldua, Diego ; Levin, Victoria ; Liberman, Julia

As countries consider how to reopen schools safely in the context of COVID-19 (coronavirus), one key question is how to assess students' learning to support learning recovery. The expected magnitude of learning losses, particularly among students with the highest needs, makes it essential for key stakeholders in the education process — policymakers, teachers, school principals, students, and their parents — to determine where students are in their learning trajectory relative to what had been expected prior to the pandemic, so they can adjust instruction and allocate resources accordingly. To collect this information, stakeholders can rely on student learning assessment, which is an essential feedback mechanism in the education system. This note provides key steps that countries with different availability of resources should consider in developing their plans for learning assessment activities to support learning recovery in the context of school reopening. Throughout this note, assessment of student learning is defined as gathering and evaluating information on what students know, understand, and can do to make informed decisions about the next steps in the educational process. In addition, some considerations and country examples for the implementation of high-stakes examinations are discussed. This note concludes with examples of learning assessment activities that countries around the world are planning or implementing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Likewise, this note highlights important lessons that can support resilience to future emergencies and crises.