Optimizing the quantity-quality mix in education : some policy tradeoffs worth considering

référence interne : 85024

Cost recovery in education : a summary of four recent papers

référence interne : 84052

Improving education management in Madagascar: results and implications of an impact evaluation

International audience

The Economic Returns to Investment in Project-Related Training : Some Evidence from World Bank Projects

International audience; Cet article évalue l'efficacité des investissements dans la formation axée sur un projet (FAP) en vue de combler le manque de compétences techniques constaté au sein des populations de projet. Les données servant à l'analyse proviennent de 115 études de la Banque Mondiale de projets agricoles ou autres (transport, vie urbaine, produits chimiques, manufacture). Contrairement à de nombreuses autres études, l'article présent ne se base pas sur les données relatives aux salaires pour calculer les taux pertinents de rentabilité, utilisant plutôt le succès d'un projet pour en mesurer les acquis. Ces derniers indiquent que la FAP rapporte d'importants bénéfices dans les pro…

Putting Inputs to Work in Elementary Schools: What Can Be Done in the Philippines?

The paper consists in estimating a value-added educational production function of primary education in the Philippines. The information used match household and school-based survey data. The Huber White technique is used so as to take into account the problem of heteroscedasticity when merging individual pupil variables with class/school variables; this procedure helps relate the outcome side of the production (student learning) that concerns the individual level with the input side (school inputs such as teacher qualification, class-size, availability of pedagogical materials, ..) that concerns an aggregate level (class or school). The results show that students taught by a teachers holdin…

User charges for education : the ability ans willingness to pay in Malawi

Investment in education is generally recognized to be essential for a country's long-term economic and social development. However, presentmacroeconomic conditions in many developing countries have obliged their governments to slow down increases in the allocation of public resources for education. As a result, the education sector is likely to develop only slowly, if at all; enrollment, already low in the poorer of the developing countries, would remain low, while the social demand for education would continue to be substantially unmet. In this setting, policy makers have recently focussed their attention on finding alternative sources of finance for education, one of which is the tapping …

Education in Ethiopia: Strengthening the Foundation for Sustainable Progress

International audience; With the end of civil war in 1991, Ethiopia's government launched a New Education and Training Policy in 1994 which, by the early 2000s, had already produced remarkable results. The gross enrollment ratio rose from 20 to 62 percent in primary education between 1993-94 and 2001-02; and in secondary and higher education it climbed, respectively, from 8 to 12 percent and from 0.5 to 1.7 percent. Yet the government can hardly afford to rest on its laurels. Primary education is still not universal, and already there are concerns about plummeting educational quality and the growing pressures to expand post-primary education. Addressing these challenges will require more re…

Managing for results in Primary Education in Madagascar

The impact of specific actions designed to streamline and tighten the workflow processes of key actors in Madagascar's primary education sector are evaluated. To inform the strategy for scaling up, a randomized experiment was carried out over two school years. The results show that interventions at the school level, reinforced by interventions at the subdistrict and district levels, succeeded in changing the behavior of the actors toward better management of key pedagogical functions. In terms of education outcomes, the interventions improved school attendance, reduced grade repetition, and raised test scores (particularly in Malagasy and mathematics), although the gains in learning at the …

Who profits from the public funding of education ? A comparison by world regions

référence interne : 84033

Student Learning in Public and Private Primary Schools in Madagascar

03058; International audience; This article examines the progress of primary education in Madagascar. The challenge facing policy makers is enormous: how to maintain (or indeed, improve) learning across schools within Madagascar based on the data from the Conference des Ministries de l'Education des Pays Ayant le Francais en Partage in five African countries where common tests were administered to second- and fifth-graders. Beyond documenting the aggregate differences across sectors, the extent to which differences across schools, particularly between those in the public and private sectors, are associated with pupils' socioeconomic background, difference sin school inputs, and gaps across …

Financing public higher education in developing countries : the potential role of loan schemes

The financing of education has emerged as a major topic of discussion among policy makers in recent years. There is evidence that in many developing countries, governments can no longer continue to increase spending on education at the high rates characteristic in the 1960s and 1970s. The macroeconomic environment has worsened, and there is keen intersectoral competition for public funds. Thus unless educational development moves away from its present heavy dependence on public funds, the expansion of education would be frustrated. One policy option is to increase the private financing of education. In this paper, we evaluate the potential effectiveness of loans schemes as a cost recovery i…

The Returns to Education in Rwanda

05077; International audience; Based on data from the 1999–2001 Household Living Conditions Survey conducted by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, we estimate wage equations for employees in Rwanda, treating the choice of employment sector as an endogenous process and making separate estimates for workers in the modern and traditional sectors of the economy. The results show that returns to education increase with the level of education, contrary to the pattern typically reported in the literature and that the returns to higher education is particularly high in Rwanda. A noteworthy feature in the results is that the returns to education are quite different across sectors of empl…

Who profits from the public funding of education : a comparison world regions

International audience

On the quality of education in developing countries : another views

On the mechanics of progress in primary education

03045; International audience; As countries grow rich, education improves in many ways. The sector enjoys more resources for education per primary school-aged child, not because of bigger budget allocations, nor an easing of the demographic burden on the system, but because the cost of inputs, especially teacher salaries, decline substantially relative to the per capita GNP. The extra resources enable countries to expand coverage and reduce the pupil–teacher ratio, with the latter receiving increasing emphasis during the past 20 years. The implicit trade-off against coverage raises questions about the efficiency and equity of education policies in developing countries, particularly in setti…

Recovering the cost of public higher education in LDCs : to what extent are loan schemes an efficient instrument ?

référence interne : 84022; ln many LDCs today, the education sector is still characterized by relatively low levels of enrollment. On the other hand, however, expansion in the public provision of education is limited by constraints in the public budget. To overcome this problem, various strategies could be considered, among which is the implementation of cost recovery policies. ln this paper, we have argued that higher education would be a suitable candidate ror such policies. Cost recovery at this level of education would be helpful, not only because of its potential effect on resource mobilization, but also because it would boost efficiency and equity in the overall distribution of public…

On the Quantity Quality trade-off in Education in Developing Countries

International audience

Are private schools more efficient than public schools ? Evidence from Tanzania

International audience; Beginning in the mid-1980s, there has been an explosive growth of private secondary schools in Tanzania. By easing constraints on private operators, the government has clearly found an effective way in the context of right public budget constraints to cope with the excess demand for this level of schooling. But has the policy also led to efficient operations in terms of student learning ? In this paper, we attempt to shed light on this issue by comparing the efficiency of four types of schools that make up the majority of schools in the country : Government and Community schools in the public sector, and Chirstian and Wazazi schools in the private sector. Using longi…

Subsidization of higher education versus expansion of primary enrollments : what can a shift of resources achieve in Sub-Saharan Africa ?

International audience; In many LDCs today, the distribution of public resources for education tends to be inefficient and inequitable in that subsidization often increases rather than decreases with the level of education. To improve efficiency and equity, a shift of resources from higher to primary education should therefore be considered. Such a shift would obviously imply an increase in the private cost of higher education, but its effect could be mitigated through a loan scheme. In this paper, our main purpose is to show what a cut in subsidies to higher education can achieve in terms of expanding primary enrollments. The results show that although the outcome differs from country to c…

The Mechanics of Progress in Education: Evidence from Cross-Country Data

The document examines first the relationship between a number of indicators concerning a country system of education (global and per-pupil public resources by level of schooling, education coverage, quality of educational outcomes, efficiency in student flow, external efficiency, equity by gender and in resource allocation, ..) and and its environment (overall sector context, demographic pressure fiscal, capacity, structure of employment, ..) on the one hand, its level of economic development on the other. The paper analyzes how the economic development affects the amount of resources mobilized for the sector with the finding that the main source of resources lies in the decrease of the tea…

Student outcomes in Philippine elementary schools: An evaluation of four experiments

International audience; Policymakers in most developing countries are concerned about high dropout rates and poor student learning in primary education. The government of the Philippines initiated the Dropout Intervention Program in 1990-92 as part of its effort to address these issues. Under this program, four experimental interventions were randomly assigned to 20 schools in selected low-income areas. Pre- and post-intervention data were collected from these schools, as well as from 10 control schools, in order to evaluate the program's impact on dropout behavior and student learning. The economic justification for replication appears to be strongest for the interventions that provided te…

Expansion of private secondary education : lessons from recent experience in Tanzania

International audience; The private sector's role in education has been the subject of much analysis and policy debate in recent years. In developing countries, public resources for education are limited and governments have traditionnally relied on private education, particularly at the post-basic levels, to meet the excess demand for education. Even when excess demand is not a major issue, advocates of private education note that private schools can be more efficient than their public sector counterparts, delivering more value in terms of student achievement per investment of resources. In this article we explore Tanzania's experience with private education during the early 1990s, a perio…

Expanding education through user charges : what can be achieved in Malawi and other LDCs ?

International audience; Two features mark the education sector in many LDCs today: first, education is publicly provided; and second. governments are faced with severe financial constraints. As a result, enrollmrnts are confined to low Ievels, and there is excess demand. To mitigate these adverse outcomes, we consider user charges as a means to mobilize additional resources for education. Under the circumstances that characterize most LDCs. we show that (i) families are willing to pay for education: (ii) the resources collected through user charges could finance a sizable expansion of education; and (iii) scholarships can offset the equity effects of user charges.

Benefit Incidence Analysis in Education

07103; The standard benefit incidence algebra generally produces biased estimates of the distribution of public spending on education when students from poor and rich families are enrolled in schools that receive different levels of public spending per student. Except in very rare instances, removing these biases entails combining several sources of information in order to evaluate how unit spending varies across different population groups. Although such disaggregation is generally difficult to obtain, we show one way to overcome the data constraints that hinder a precise calculation of the incidence of public spending on education. The empirical example discussed in this article indicates…

On equity in education again : an international comparison

This article proposes an approach to answering two questions: first, does investment in education help growth; second, does the allocation of investment in education matter? I develop a model where individual ability is heterogeneous and education both ...

Les taux de rendements sociaux "complets" de l'éducation : estimation à partir de la performance des pays en terme de croissance économique

Expansion of Private Secondary Education: Lessons from Recent Experience in Tanzania

International audience; The private sector's role in education has been the subject of much analysis and policy debate in recent years. In developing countries, public resources for education are limited and governments have traditionnally relied on private education, particularly at the post-basic levels, to meet the excess demand for education. Even when excess demand is not a major issue, advocates of private education note that private schools can be more efficient than their public sector counterparts, delivering more value in terms of student achievement per investment of resources. In this article we explore Tanzania's experience with private education during the early 1990s, a perio…