There is a growing belief in development policy circles that participation by local communities in basic service delivery can promote development outcomes. A central plank of public policy for improving primary education services in India is the participation of village education committees...

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as key to improving their efficiency. In India, the current government flagship program on universal primary education organizes community members, specifically locally elected leaders and parents of...

This article presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages for 1922-2000 in India using individual tax return data. The data show that the shares of the top 0.01 percent, 0.1 percent, and 1 percent in total income shrank substantially from the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s but then...

Many developing country governments determine eligibility for anti-poverty programs using censuses of household assets. Does this distort subsequent reporting of, or actual purchases of, those assets? We ran a nationwide experiment in Indonesia where, in randomly selected provinces, the...

This paper tests the effectiveness of an entertainment education television series, MTV Shuga, aimed at providing information and changing attitudes and behaviors related to HIV/AIDS. Using a simple model, the paper shows that "edutainment" can work through an individual or a social channel....

We examine the impact of offering conditional cash transfer (CCT) beneficiaries the choice to receive cash transfers in bank accounts instead of cash. We investigate the effects on savings behavior and downstream outcomes such as assets and trust. We find, on average, no significant impact on...

This article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in South Africa on children's nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact. In the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the South African social pension program were expanded for...

The authors report results from a randomized evaluation comparing three school-based HIV/AIDS interventions in Kenya: (1) training teachers in the Kenyan Government's HIV/AIDS-education curriculum; (2) encouraging students to debate the role of condoms and to write essays on how to protect...

The authors report results from a randomized evaluation comparing three school-based HIV/AIDS interventions in Kenya: (1) training teachers in the Kenyan Government's HIV/AIDS-education curriculum; (2) encouraging students to debate the role of condoms and to write essays on how to protect...

We are five years away from 2015, the year when the Millennium Development Goal of universal education is supposed to be achieved, and the school attendance numbers do look good. In many parts of both East and West Africa, and almost all of South Asia, school enrollment has grown rapidly, with...