Person:
Azevedo, João Pedro
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Inequality and Shared Prosperity,
Social Protection and Labor,
Education
Degrees
Departments
Global Practice on Poverty, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
July 19, 2023
Biography
João Pedro Azevedo is a Lead Economist at the World Bank in Washington. He currently works for the Poverty and Equity Global Practice in the European and Central Asia region, focusing on Central Asia and Turkey and leading the region's Statistics Team. João Pedro also leads the Global Solution Group on Welfare Measurement and Statistical Capacity for Results from the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. João Pedro has focused much of his work on helping developing countries improve their systems for evidence-based decision making. He worked in Colombia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic for five years, and led important regional public efforts such as the Latin American & Caribbean Stats Team and the LAC Monitoring and Evaluation Network. João Pedro brings solid and varied experience in applied econometrics to the fields of poverty and inequality. Before joining the Bank, João Pedro served as the superintendent of monitoring and evaluation at the Secretary of Finance for the State of Rio de Janeiro, as well as a research fellow at the Institute of Applied Economic Research from the Brazilian Ministry of Planning. He is a former chairman of the Latin American & Caribbean Network on Inequality and Poverty and holds a PhD in Economics.
Publication Search Results
1 - 9 of 9
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Publication
Setting Reasonable Performance Targets for Public Service Delivery
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-03)Reaching agreement on a reasonable performance target is a challenge, with costs associated with getting it wrong. Attention in the literature has focused on the potential negative effects of gaming or of creaming. However, even if there is no gaming or creaming taking place, there can still be costs associated with setting a level of the performance target that is either too low or too high. On the one hand, if the negotiated performance target is too low, there is a strong risk that the target would be met without any change in behavior or performance from what would have been realized without a performance management system. In that case, there would be no benefit -- only the cost of covering the administrative costs associated with developing the monitoring and management systems. On the other hand, if the negotiated performance target is too high, there could also be significant costs. The exact nature of the costs depends on which one of two unattractive options the principal chooses to follow once it becomes apparent that the performance targets were set unrealistically high. If the principal chooses simply to waive any possible repercussions for the agents for not meeting the performance targets, this can undermine the credibility of the system. If the principal insists on holding agents to meeting the performance targets -- no matter how unrealistic they were -- this can breed resentment and adversely affect future productivity. This paper considers some approaches to target setting that have been used in the literature and proposes an approach based on the use of quantile regressions to construct a Characteristic Adjusted Performance distribution of performance to guide the selection of targets. The paper then presents two concrete examples of applications of this approach related to the setting of targets on School Test Scores and Improvement in Homicide rates in Police Districts in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. -
Publication
Kyrgyz Republic: Social Sectors at a Glance
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)Traditional benchmarks to assess performance rely on unconditional rankings or regional averages. This paper uses a recently developed methodology based on quantile regressions and initial conditions to propose alternative benchmarks for social sectors in Kyrgyz Republic. Covering a wide set of indicators, the analysis reveals mixed results for Kyrgyz Republic. The country has made important strides in many social areas, with outstanding results in reducing child mortality and undernourishment. However, other areas are still key challenges and demand further attention and resources, as evidenced by the underachievement in maternal mortality, educational performance, and increasing informality in labor markets. -
Publication
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)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. -
Publication
Remote Learning During COVID-19: Lessons from Today, Principles for Tomorrow
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11-30)School closures during COVID-19 (coronavirus) led to an unprecedented global experiment in the delivery of remote learning. This report seeks to assess what lessons can be drawn from experiences of remote learning during COVID-19 in K-12 education, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries. It focuses on the period from March 2020 to October 2021 and addresses the following key questions: 1. Was remote learning during COVID-19 taken up and if so, was it effective That is, did children learn as much as they did during pre-pandemic, in-person learning 2. What lessons can governments derive from this wide-spread experience 3. How might policymakers use these lessons to reimagine learning as schools begin to reopen This report is part of a larger effort led by the World Bank to provide guidance and technical assistance to optimize country effectiveness in the design and execution of remote learning strategies. It has been developed in conjunction with Remote Learning During the Global School Lockdown: Multi-Country Lessons, a qualitative study conducted between May and November 2020 to understand the perceived effectiveness of remote and remedial learning solutions implemented across 17 countries. -
Publication
Learning Poverty: Measures and Simulations
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10)COVID-19-related school closures are pushing countries off track from achieving their learning goals. This paper builds on the concept of learning poverty and draws on axiomatic properties from social choice literature to propose and motivate a distribution-sensitive measures of learning poverty. Numerical, empirical, and practical reasons for the relevance and usefulness of these complementary inequality sensitive aggregations for simulating the effects of COVID-19 are presented. In a post-COVID-19 scenario of no remediation and low mitigation effectiveness for the effects of school closures, the simulations show that learning poverty increases from 53 to 63 percent. Most of this increase seems to occur in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries, especially in East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and South Asia. The countries that had the highest levels of learning poverty before COVID-19 (predominantly in Africa and the low-income country group) might have the smallest absolute and relative increases in learning poverty, reflecting how great the learning crisis was in those countries before the pandemic. Measures of learning poverty and learning deprivation sensitive to changes in distribution, such as gap and severity measures, show differences in learning loss regional rankings. Africa stands to lose the most. Countries with higher inequality among the learning poor, as captured by the proposed learning poverty severity measure, would need far greater adaptability to respond to broader differences in student needs. -
Publication
Learning Poverty in the Time of COVID-19: A Crisis within a Crisis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12-01)This brief summarizes the results of simulations estimating the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in learning poverty. Of 720 million primary school age children, 382 million are learning poor, either out of school or below the minimum proficiency level in reading. COVID-19 could boost that number by an additional 72 million to 454 million. In a post-COVID-19 scenario of no remediation and low mitigation effectiveness for the effects of school closures, simulations show learning poverty increasing from 53 percent of primary-school-age children to 63 percent. -
Publication
Learning Losses during COVID-19: Global Estimates of an Invisible and Unequal Crisis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10)This paper presents updated simulation results of the potential effects of COVID-19-related school closures on learning outcomes globally. The simulation, which updates and extends prior work by Azevedo, Hasan et al. (2021) and Azevedo (2020), examines potential learning losses as the pandemic moves into the third year. Beyond reflecting the longer duration of the crisis, the paper extends prior work by using country-specific observed school closure information, accounts for the partial reopening of some education systems, updates the baseline Learning Poverty estimates to reflect its best estimate to date just before the pandemic (circa 2019), and uses updated June 2021 macroeconomic projections to reflect the economic magnitude of the crisis. The analysis finds that the overall learning levels are likely to fall substantially around the world. Under an “intermediate” scenario, school closures could potentially increase the share of children in Learning Poverty in low- and middle-income countries by 13 percentage points, to 70 percent. Globally, learning adjusted years of schooling could fall by 1.1 years, and the share of youth below minimum proficiency on the Programme for International Student Assessment could rise by 12.3 percentage points. Furthermore, school shutdowns could generate lifetime earning losses of $21 trillion. These results imply that decisive action is needed to recover and accelerate learning. -
Publication
Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)School closures due to COVID-19 have left more than a billion students out of school. This paper presents the results of simulations considering three, five and seven months of school closure and different levels of mitigation effectiveness resulting in optimistic, intermediate and pessimistic global scenarios. Using data on 157 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall. COVID-19 could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 0.9 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.9 years to between 7.0 and 7.6 years. Close to 7 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $355, $872, or $1,408 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,472 and $25,680 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, like girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by the school closures. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. The world could thus face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor and be unable to meet the goal by 2030 unless drastic remedial action is taken. -
Publication
Simulating the Potential Impacts of COVID-19 School Closures on Schooling and Learning Outcomes: A Set of Global Estimates
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2021-03-17)This paper presents simulations of the potential effect of COVID-19-related school closures on schooling and learning outcomes. It considers four scenarios—varying in both the duration of school closures and the effectiveness of any mitigation strategies being deployed by governments. Using data on 174 countries, the analysis finds that the global level of schooling and learning will fall substantially. School closures could result in a loss of between 0.3 and 1.1 years of schooling adjusted for quality, bringing down the effective years of basic schooling that students achieve during their lifetime from 7.8 years to between 6.7 and 7.5 years. Close to 11 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Exclusion and inequality will likely be exacerbated if already marginalized and vulnerable groups, such as girls, ethnic minorities, and persons with disabilities, are more adversely affected by school closures. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $366 to $1,776 in yearly earnings. In present value terms, this amounts to between $6,680 and $32,397 dollars in lost earnings over a typical student's lifetime. Globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion. By this measure, the world could stand to lose as much as 16 percent of the investments that governments make in the basic education of this cohort of students. In the pessimistic and very pessimistic scenarios, cumulative losses could add up to between $16 and $20 trillion in present value terms. Unless drastic remedial action is taken, the world could face a substantial setback in achieving the goal of halving the percentage of learning poor by 2030.