Person:
Filmer, Deon
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Education,
Evidence-based public policy,
Inequality and shared prosperity,
Jobs and poverty,
Social protection and labor,
Social Protection and Growth
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Research Group
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 31, 2023
Biography
Deon Filmer is a Lead Economist in the Research Group at the World Bank and Co-Director of the World Development Report 2018 Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. He has also previously served as Lead Economist in the Human Development department of the Africa Region of the World Bank. He works on issues of human capital and skills, service delivery, and the impact of policies and programs to improve human development outcomes—with research spanning the areas of education, health, social protection, and poverty and inequality. He has published widely in refereed journals, including studies of the impact of demand-side programs on schooling and learning; the roles of poverty, gender, orphanhood, and disability in explaining education inequalities; and the determinants of effective service delivery. He has recently co-authored the following books: Making Schools Work: New Evidence from Accountability Reforms, Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, and From Mines and Wells to Well-Built Minds: Turning Sub-Saharan Africa's Natural Resource Wealth into Human Capital. He was a core team member of the World Bank's World Development Reports in 1995 Workers in an Integrating World and 2004 Making Services Work for Poor People, and a contributor to 2007’s report Development and the Next Generation. He holds a PhD and MA from Brown University and a BA from Tufts University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
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Publication
Toward Successful Development Policies: Insights from Research in Development Economics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13 short, nontechnical briefing notes prepared in response to this request, summarizing a selection of major insights in development economics in the past decade. The notes synthesize evidence from recent research on how policies should be designed, implemented, and evaluated, and provide illustrations of what works and what does not in selected policy areas. -
Publication
Trends and Linkages in Schooling and Work among Cambodian Youth: A Cohort Panel Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-03-28)Cambodia’s education sector has faced and overcome a number of challenges in recent history. Several decades of political and social unrest caused by the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s and Vietnamese occupation in the 1980’s dealt a severe blow to the education system and left it in a state of disintegration. Primary and secondary enrollment through to the 1980’s fell, with school attendance dramatically lower for individuals who were teenagers in 1975 compared to previous or subsequent cohorts (de Walque, 2004). There were improvements by the following decade: The Paris Agreements and beginnings of UN sponsored elections ushered in a renewed focus on building and reconstructing schools and increasing the national budget allocation toward education, which reached 15.7 percent in 2001 (GAD/C 2002). Recent generations of youth enjoy greater access to schooling than previous ones; 49 percent of youth finish their education at a level higher than their father and 63 percent finish at a level higher than their mother (ILO, 2013). Net primary enrollments increased from 84 percent in 1992 to 96.4 percent in 2012, and net secondary enrollments from 16.6 percent in 2000 to 35 percent in 2012 (Tandon and Fukao, 2015). The labor market in Cambodia also went through a transformation in part due tostrong economic growth for the last two decades: salaried employment rose one-third in this period from 23 percent in 2004 to 30 percent in 2011 (ILO, 2013). As of 2015, Cambodia has attained the lower-middle-income status, with gross national income (GNI) per capita reaching US$1,070. Section one presents the data, a general overview of the cohort panel approach, and initial visual evidence on and discussion of cross-cohort patterns. Section two presents methods and results from our empirical exercise disentangling cohort versus age and time effects. Here we are able to get a more accurate insight into our first objective. Section three uses a regression analysis framework to present evidence on the relationship between early cohort experiences and labor adult labor market outcomes, our second objective. Section four concludes. -
Publication
Are Teachers in Africa Poorly Paid? Evidence from 15 Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08)Pay levels for public sector workers—and especially teachers—are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while simple comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study presents data on teacher pay from 15 African countries, along with five comparator countries from other regions. The results suggest that in several (seven) countries, teachers' monthly salaries are lower than other formal sector workers with comparable levels of education and experience. However, in all of those countries, teachers report working significantly fewer hours than other workers, so that their hourly wage is higher. Teachers who report fewer hours are no more likely to report holding a second job, although teachers overall are nearly two times more likely to hold a second job than other workers. With higher national incomes, the absolute value of teacher salaries rises, but they fall as a percentage of income per capita. The study explores variation across types of teacher contracts, the association between teacher pay and student performance, and the association between teacher pay premia and other aspects of economies.