This paper uses three waves of longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the start of the project and was immediately eligible for project-provided services when they...

The study examines the effect of software piracy on inclusive human development in 11 African countries for which software piracy data is available for the period 2000-2010. The empirical evidence is based on instrumental variable panel Fixed Effects (FE) and Tobit models in order to control for...

Despite the growing body of literature examining the effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives, there remains limited substantiation for whether and how open budgeting contributes to reductions in poverty and improvements in the lives of the poor. This paper reviews available...

Nighttime lights are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity and economic development in subnational spatial units. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture is limited. We construct local indicators of household wealth, education and...

Be it Olympics or tennis or any other sport, we see that few countries always have greater representation on the medals tally. Tennis is a sport that demands a high level of hard work and investment not just in coaching, but also for its accessories. ATP and WTA are two professional bodies that...

Economic growth is a permanent objective of economic policy, and in the medium and long run it is reflected, as we know, in the process of development. But this is not enough for an economy to grow. It is absolutely necessary for the quantitative jump to be accompanied by a qualitative change,...

This paper uses unique data collected in rural Pakistan to assess the extent to which consanguinity, which is widespread in North Africa, Central and West Asia, and most parts of South Asia, is linked to child cognitive ability and nutritional status. As economic benefits of marrying cousins may...

In the light of evidence that poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the World with the exception of Africa, where about 45 percent of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa did not achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) extreme poverty target. Therefore, this study assesses whether...