Like many large countries, Indonesia has difficulty attracting doctors to service in rural and remote areas. To guide the creation of incentives for service in these areas, the authors analyze two sets of data about physicians: 1) the locations chosen by graduating medical students before and...

This paper reviews the effectiveness and efficiency of key policy instruments for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Based on a simple cross-country regression analysis, the paper argues that average Millennium Development Goal progress is likely to be too slow to meet...

As evidence from rigorous impact evaluations grows in development, there have been more calls to complement impact evaluation analysis with cost analysis, so that policy makers can make investment decisions based on costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important considerations for...

The international development community has been grappling with the challenges of implementing development programs and, consequently, with the design of practical approaches to attaining program objectives. This paper contributes to the emerging discussion on addressing the implementation...

China has embarked on a series of reforms designed to improve the efficiency of productive enterprises through the introduction of elements of a competitive market economy. Vocational and technical education and training (VTE) is to be expanded and improved to meet the skilled labor requirements...

The author uses the regional structure of the economy, proxied by the shares of services and industry in regional gross domestic product (GDP), as an indicator of the demand for educated workers. By examining whether the level of schooling as a function of shares of services and industry differs...

Cote d'Ivoire spends more of its budget (42 percent) on education than any other country in the world. The purpose of this paper is to present an economic assessment of vocational and technical education (VTE) within the country. This assessment takes a three-pronged approach. First, it studies...

Past research often attributed most differences in student learning to socioeconomic factors, implying that the potential for direct educational interventions to reduce learning inequality was limited. The author shows that learning achievement can be improved through appropriately designed and...

The impact of international students and skilled immigration in the United States on innovative activity is estimated using a model of idea generation. In the main specification a system of three equations is estimated, where dependent variables are total patent applications, patents awarded to...

This paper summarizes the socioeconomic conditions of children around the world. It explores solutions to the main problems, along with a summary of the costs and benefits of some of the solutions. Emphasis is on the results from rigorous studies, impact evaluations, and randomized experiments....