03. Journals
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These are journal articles published in World Bank journals as well as externally by World Bank authors.
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Measuring Human Capital in Middle Income Countries
(Elsevier, 2022-12)This paper develops an indicator that measures the level of human capital to address the specific education and health challenges faced by middle income countries. We apply this indicator to countries in Europe and Central Asia, where productive employment requires skills that are more prevalent among higher education graduates, and where good health is associated to low levels of adult health risk factors. The Europe and Central Asia Human Capital Index (ECA-HCI) extends the World Bank's Human Capital Index by adding a measure of quality-adjusted years of higher education to the original education component, and it includes the prevalence of three adult health risk factors—obesity, smoking, and heavy drinking—as an additional proxy for latent health status. The results show that children born today in the average country in Europe and Central Asia will be almost half as productive as they would have had they reached the benchmark of complete education and full health. Countries with good basic education outcomes do not necessarily have good higher education outcomes, and high prevalence of adult health risk factors can offset good education indicators. This extension of the Human Capital Index could also be useful for assessing the state of human capital in middle-income countries in general. -
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Improving the Well-Being of Adolescent Girls in Developing Countries
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2022-10-13)This paper conducts a large, narrative review of interventions that might plausibly (a) increase educational attainment, (b) delay childbearing, and/or (c) delay marriage for adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Using 108 interventions from 78 studies, predominantly in LMICs, the paper summarizes the performance of 15 categories of interventions in improving these outcomes. Transfer programs emerge as broadly effective in increasing educational attainment but their effects on delaying fertility and marriage remain mixed and dependent on context. Construction of schools in underserved areas and the provision of information on returns to schooling and academic performance also increase schooling. No category of interventions is found to be categorically effective in delaying pregnancies and reducing child marriages among adolescent girls. While targeted provision of sexual and reproductive health services, including vouchers and subsidies for family planning, and increasing job opportunities for women seem promising, more research is needed to evaluate the longer-term effects of such interventions. We propose that future studies should aim to measure short-term outcomes that can form good surrogates for long-term welfare gains and should collect detailed cost information. -
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How Do Shocks Affect Enrollment in Faith-Based Schools?: Evidence from West Africa
(Taylor and Francis, 2022-01-28)The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed concerns about how shocks may affect religious and other private schools in low-income countries, especially when they do not benefit from state support. By reducing parental incomes, shocks – not only epidemics but also natural disasters and conflicts, reduce overall enrollment in school. But they may also lead to a shift from private to public schools with potentially differentiated effects by type of private school depending on context. In addition, household responses to shocks such as migration may lead to a change in the socio-cultural context in which households live, and these changes may also affect school choice. This paper explores the effects of shocks and migration on school choice in West Africa. Results suggest that shocks and migration lead to a shift from private to public schools, but with differentiated effects by type of private schools. -
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Information, Knowledge, and Behavior: Evaluating Alternative Methods of Delivering School Information to Parents
(University of Chicago Press, 2022-01-01)This paper evaluates alternative approaches to disseminating information about a school-based management program in Indonesia. Low-intensity approaches, sending a letter from the principal or a colorful pamphlet home with the child, had no impact. Holding a facilitated meeting with school stakeholders or sending targeted text messages (SMSs) to parents increased knowledge and participation. Facilitated meetings increased overall knowledge, fostered a feeling of transparency, and increased participation in formal channels for providing feedback to the school. SMSs increased knowledge about specific aspects of the program, such as the grant amount, and increased participation through informal channels. -
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Cognitive Achievement Production in Madagascar: A Value-Added Model Approach
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-06-19)In this paper, we measure the contribution of an additional year of schooling on skills acquisition for a cohort of young adults in Madagascar. We estimate a value-added model of learning achievement that includes test scores measured at adolescence, thereby reducing the potential for omitted variable bias. We demonstrate that schooling increases cognitive skills among young adults. The value-added of a year of schooling during adolescence is 0.15 to 0.26 standard deviation. Our results show the skills gap widens in adolescence, as students with higher cognitive skills complete more grades, accumulating more skills in their transition to adulthood. -
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Teacher Beliefs: Why They Matter and What They Are
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-06-14)Teacher effectiveness is low in many developing countries. How can it be improved? We show that understanding teacher beliefs may be an important but overlooked part of the puzzle. Our review of recent evidence shows that teacher beliefs can impact student outcomes directly; they can also mediate policy implementation. Despite this, we find that teacher beliefs are seldom accounted for or even measured in impact evaluations of teacher-focused programs. Most of these programs ultimately fail to change teacher behavior. Next, using survey data from 20,000 teachers across nine developing countries, we discuss teacher beliefs about their role, their effort, and their students’ learning. We uncover four insights. First, teachers exhibit fixed mindsets on the learning potential of disadvantaged students. For instance, nearly 43 percent of teachers believe that “there is little they can do to help a student learn” if parents are uneducated. Second, in most countries, more teachers believe that students deserve additional attention if they are performing well than if they are lagging behind. This suggests that teachers may be reinforcing rather than compensating for baseline gaps in student levels. Third, there is some normalization of absenteeism—nearly one in four teachers believe it is acceptable to be absent if students are left with work to do. Finally, teacher support for pay-for-performance varies widely across countries. -
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Replication Redux: The Reproducibility Crisis and the Case of Deworming
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-11-28)In 2004, a landmark study showed that an inexpensive medication to treat parasitic worms could improve health and school attendance for millions of children in many developing countries. Eleven years later, a headline in The Guardian reported that this treatment, deworming, had been “debunked.” The pronouncement followed an effort to replicate and re-analyze the original study, as well as an update to a systematic review of the effects of deworming. This story made waves amidst discussion of a reproducibility crisis in some of the social sciences. In this paper, I explore what it means to “replicate” and “reanalyze” a study, both in general and in the specific case of deworming. I review the broader replication efforts in economics, then examine the key findings of the original deworming paper in light of the “replication,” “reanalysis,” and “systematic review.” I also discuss the nature of the link between this single paper's findings, other papers’ findings, and any policy recommendations about deworming. Through this example, I provide a perspective on the ways replication and reanalysis work, the strengths and weaknesses of systematic reviews, and whether there is, in fact, a reproducibility crisis in economics. -
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Private and Social Returns to Investment in Education: The Case of Turkey with Alternative Methods
(Taylor and Francis, 2020-11-04)This paper estimates private and social returns to investment in education in Turkey, using the 2017 Household Labour Force Survey (latest available at the time of writing) and alternative methodologies. The analysis uses the 1997 education reform of increasing compulsory education by three years as an instrument. This results in a private rate of return on the order of 16% for higher education and a social return of 10%. Using the number of children younger than age 15 in the household as an exclusion restriction, sample selection correction is applied, and it shows that the returns to education for females are higher than those for males. Contrary to many findings in other countries, private returns to those working in the public sector are higher than those in the private sector, and private returns to those who followed the vocational track in secondary education are higher than those in the general academic track. The paper discusses the policy implications of the findings. -
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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Incentives to Improve HIV Prevention Outcomes for Young Females in Eswatini: Sitakhela Likusasa Impact Evaluation Protocol and Baseline Results
(BMC/Springer Nature, 2020-10-22)Eswatini continues to have the highest prevalence of HIV in the world, and one of the highest HIV incidences among adult populations (aged 15–49). This analysis reports on both key elements of study design/protocol and baseline results from an impact evaluation of an intervention incentivizing (i) initiation, enrolment, attendance or completion of some form of education, and (ii) lower risk sexual behavior. -
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Learning-adjusted years of schooling: Defining a new macro measure of education
(Elsevier, 2020-08-01)The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses is a quantity-based one: The average number of years of schooling in a population. But as recent research shows, students in different countries who have completed the same number of years of school often have vastly different learning outcomes. We therefore propose a new summary measure, the Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling (LAYS). This measure combines quantity and quality of schooling into a single easy-to-understand metric of progress, revealing considerably larger cross-country education gaps than the standard metric. We show that the comparisons produced by this measure are robust to different ways of adjusting for learning and that LAYS is consistent with other evidence, including other approaches to quality adjustment. Like other learning measures, LAYS reflects learning, and barriers to learning, both inside and outside of school; also, cross-country comparability of LAYS rests on assumptions related to learning trajectories and the validity, reliability, and comparability of test data. Acknowledging these limitations, we argue that LAYS nonetheless improves on the standard metric in key ways.