Publications

Many educational interventions boost outcomes for girls in settings where girls face educational disadvantages, but which of those interventions are proven to function effectively at large scale? In contrast to earlier reviews, this review focuses on large-scale programs and policies—those that reach at least 10,000 students—and on final school outcomes such as completion and student learning rather than intermediate school outcomes such as enrollment and attendance.

How many immigrants with less than university education, for a given immigration quota, maximise economic output? The answer is simple—zero—in the canonical model of the labour market, where the marginal product of a university-educated immigrant is always higher. We build an alternative model, following Jones (2005), in which national production occurs through a set of Leontief production functions that shift over time with technological change.

The structural changes in an economy that accompany its growth to high-income status have been predictable in Europe, the United States, and Asia, characterized by declining employment in agriculture and rising levels of urbanization driven by jobs in the modern industrial sector. As agricultural productivity rises, the share of people employed in agriculture declines, and both urbanization and employment in manufacturing increase.

From the final decade of the twentieth century, four small economies were quick to capitalize on the developmental advantages conffered by globalization. Although they did not escape buffeting from periodic regional and international crises, Dubai, Ireland, Panama, and Singapore managed to sustain moderately high average rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth for well over 25 years.

The phrase “giving with one hand while taking with the other” has rarely been more appropriate than in examining the UK’s recent approach to the aid budget. Under current plans, by increasing its contributions to the IMF’s concessional lending pot, the UK will actually reduce the amount of aid available to developing countries and receive credit for doing so. The result is that every £1 billion that the UK lends to the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust Fund (PRGT)—the IMF’s concessional lending facility—would lead to a net loss for developing countries of up to £310 million.

The first age of pandemics followed in the wake of farming, cities and trade, because infections leverage proximity and numbers to survive and evolve. After millennia of mass mortality, followed by two centuries of progress against plagues driven by sanitary and medical revolutions, will we allow a second age of pandemic death to flourish in the dense and connected world that progress has created? A poxed century can be avoided if we cooperate to respond.

This paper describes the rise and fall of privatization in the World Bank as a means to improve the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in its client countries. While acknowledging that privatization was far more difficult than anticipated to implement correctly, particularly in low-income and institutionally weak countries, the continuing difficulty of applying technical fixes to still large, still underperforming, and still capital-short SOE sectors justifies a renewed attempt at privatization

The August 23 allocation of SDRs has given low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) breathing space on their balance sheets to confront the monetary and fiscal challenges of the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the next few weeks, at the UN General Assembly meetings and the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank, the international community will discuss the possibility of reallocating (or recycling or channeling) developed countries´ SDR allocation, largely unneeded by them, to LMICs.