There is a consensus on the need for Thailand to reform its education system to be able to compete with other high performing countries in the region. In terms of learning outcomes, the most recent evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment shows little improvement over...

Wealth and gender inequity in the accumulation of cognitive skills is measured as the association between subject competency and wealth and gender using the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Wealth inequity is found to occur not through disparate household characteristics...

Data from three rounds of nationally representative health surveys in India are used to assess the impact of selective mortality on children’s anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario that all children who died in the first...

The authors use data from three waves of the India National Family Health Survey to explore the relationship between the month of birth and the health outcomes of young children in India. They find that children born during the monsoon months have lower anthropometric scores compared with...

The Jordan Education Initiative, launched in 2003 under the umbrella of the World Economic Forum, is a public-private partnership, or multi-stakeholder partnership, that integrates information and communication technologies into the education process as a tool for teaching and learning in grades...

The 2003 PISA Korea sample is used to examine the association between within-school ability tracking and mathematics achievement. Estimates of a variety of econometric models reveal that tracking is positively associated with mathematics achievement among females and that this association...

The authors describe trends in single parenthood in Russia, examining factors that affect living arrangements in single-mother families. Before economic reform, single mothers and their children were somewhat protected form poverty by government assistance (income support, subsidized child care,...

The authors evaluate the effect of various community level infrastructure rehabilitation projects undertaken in rural Georgia on household well-being. Their analysis is based on combining household and community level survey data. The authors'empirical approach uses the panel structure of the...

The authors estimate the economic losses related to the negative effect of smoking on wages in a context of a developing country. Using data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Monitoring Survey, they jointly estimate a system of three equations: the smoking decision and two separate wage...

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...