How can Penang upgrade and diversify its economy? This paper addresses this question using a number of methodologies that have been developed for assessing competitiveness and identifying the direction of future industrial evolution. The results show that although Penang was successful in...

This paper examines the phenomenon of the over-supply of teachers but shortage of qualified teachers in Indonesia. Using a theoretical framework of government-dominated market with government-set wage rate and demand for teachers, the analysis explores how teacher supply, particularly the...

This paper examines public sector size and performance management in post-revolution Tunisia, drawing on macro-empirical, legal, and qualitative analyses. The paper first shows that public sector employment figures and the wage bill have increased significantly since the 2011 revolution, but...

This paper assesses inequality of opportunity in educational achievement using the Human Opportunity Index methodology on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment. The findings suggest that there are large inequalities in learning outcomes as measured by demonstrated...

Despite impressive gains in increasing access to school over the past 20 years, an estimated 57 million children worldwide do not go to school. Abolishing school fees has increased enrollment rates in several countries where enrollments were low and school fees were high. However, such policies...

Good teachers are essential for high-quality educational systems. However, little is known about teachers'skills formation during college. By combining two standardized tests for Colombian students, one taken at the end of senior year in high school and the other when students are near...

This paper examines wage dynamics and turnover using tracking data of adolescents from the Philippines. The analysis uses individual test scores in grade 6 to proxy abilities. The empirical results show that (i) returns to labor market experience are large, nearly a half of the conventional...

One of the most fruitful advances in modern economics has been the introduction of psychological realism into the model of"economic man."The World Development Report 2015 organizes the evidence about how humans actually think and make decisions into a coherent framework useful for designing...

Behavioral economics recognizes that mental models -- intuitive sets of ideas about how things work -- can bias an individual's perceptions of himself and the world. By representing an ascriptive category of people as unworthy, a mental model can foster unjust social exclusion of, for example, a...

In the past two years alone, at least six systematic reviews or meta-analyses have examined the interventions that improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, these reviews have sometimes reached starkly different conclusions: reviews, in turn, recommend information...