Low and middle income countries

Adolescents make up a larger proportion of the population in lower- and middle-income countries than ever before. Given that adolescence is critical in determining later life opportunities and outcomes, this youth bulge brings both unprecedented risks and opportunities. This report presents baseline data for a large study assessing the effect of an integrated community-based programme, PAnKH, that aims to delay age at marriage, increase school retention and improve sexual reproductive health (SRH) of adolescent girls in India.

We formalize a noted [Guryan et al., 2009] but unexplored source of bias in peer effect estimation, arising because people cannot be their own peer.

In low- and middle-income countries (LIMCs), measuring early childhood development (ECD) with standard tests in large scale surveys and evaluations of interventions is difficult and expensive. Multi-dimensional screeners and single-domain tests (‘short tests’) are frequently used as alternatives. However, their validity in these circumstances is unknown. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and concurrent validity of three multi-dimensional screeners (Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQ-3), Denver Developmental Screening Test (Denver-II), Battelle Developmental Inventory screener (BDI-2)) and two single-domain tests (MacArthur-Bates Short-Forms (SFI and SFII), WHO Motor Milestones (WHO-Motor)) in 1,311 children 6–42 months in Bogota, Colombia.

We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under correlate with the quantity of public services delivered, using data from the Nigerian Civil Service.

The first component of the centre’s work involves partnering with the Governments of Ghana and Ethiopia to co-produce modelling tools and analyses of the key tax and benefit policy and administration issues that these countries face.

Mediating pathways in the socio-economic gradient of child development: Evidence from children 6–42 months in Bogota

This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition. The intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply also increased.

When markets are incomplete, cultural norms may play an important role in shaping economic behavior. In this paper, we explore whether income shocks i

This paper uses unique primary data on directly elicited individual subjective expectations to analyse and characterize the process that generates the income of poor, rural Indian households.

Many low-income countries face the hefty challenge of increasing sanitation coverage, in both rural and urban areas, which demand different solutions. In response, governments, with support from international agencies, bilateral donors and non-government organisations, are deploying a range of programmes and policies to accelerate progress towards the new global goals. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is one popular approach. CLTS works with an entire community to identify the negative effects of poor sanitation, especially the practice of open defecation, and empowers them to collectively find solutions. CLTS is understood to be more suitable for small, rural and homogeneous communities, however it is still considered an appropriate solution for more urbanised areas. In this brief, we provide quantitative evidence to support this conjecture and bring forward a simple rule of thumb that allows more efficient programme targeting. We suggest that using this information can improve the targeting of CLTS in Nigeria, and possibly other countries, freeing up scarce resources to identify and test complementary sanitation approaches suitable for more urbanised communities.

Using unique data from Pakistan we estimate a model of demand for differentiated products in 112 rural education markets with significant choice among public and private schools. Our model accounts for the endogeneity of school fees and the characteristics of students attending the school.

We evaluate the large-scale pilot program of an innovative and major welfare inter- vention in Colombia, which combines home visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.

We develop a tax micro-simulator model (MEXTAX) that can quantify the revenue and distributional impact of tax reforms in Mexico using micro-level data. We use MEXTAX to assess revenue-raising reforms to Mexico’s direct and indirect tax systems of 2010.

We examine the impact of a long-term programme designed to raise non-cognitive skills of children and adolescents in slums in Bombay. We use a cross-cutting design with two comparison groups of peers for young adults who have attended the programme until leaving high school to analyse whether, compared to those from a similar environment and background, enrolment in the programme demonstrably raises such skills. We find evidence of substantial impacts on both self-esteem and self-efficacy (of about one standard deviation), as well as evidence of a smaller impact on life evaluation and aspirations.

This paper contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance.

LATAX is a multi-country flexible tax micro-simulation model developed by researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the analysis of

This paper extends analyses of association between maternal mental health and infant growth in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to children through age eight years, and broaden analyses to cognitive and psychosocial outcomes.