The Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP) Survey is an initiative of the World Bank in cooperation with other development partners and nongovernmental agencies and carried out in more than 14 countries globally. In Ghana, the first phase of the survey focusing on adults in urban communities was carried out in cooperation with the University of Ghana's Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER), the Ministry of Education, the Council for Technical and Vocatio...

Ghana is on a strong trajectory toward solidifying its middle income status. Today, more children than at any time in the history of Ghana have access to basic and secondary education. Over the past decade, incidence of extreme poverty has been cut in half amid strong economic growth. Ghana's recent achievements point to the possibility of more fully realizing the human potential of all individuals and of the country. Basic Education beyond the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana argues ...

Skills development in Ghana encompasses foundational skills, transferable/soft-skills, and technical and vocational skills. This report focuses on one segment of this skills development system: formal and informal technical and vocational education and training (TVET) at the pre-tertiary level. TVET represents a major intersection between education, youth and the labor market. The government has long promised to the population that increasing technical and vocational skills training opport...

Despite a spectacular expansion of the higher education sector in Sub-Saharan Africa, the supply of tertiary education has generally failed to keep pace with demand, and the region continues to lag behind all other regions in terms of access to tertiary education. This is in part a consequence of deeply entrenched patterns of inequitable access to higher education, and the perpetuation of what researchers refer to as "elite systems." To date, access to tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Afr...

A comprehensive guide to running randomized impact evaluations of social programs in developing countriesThis book provides a comprehensive yet accessible guide to running randomized impact evaluations of social programs. Drawing on the experience of researchers at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which has run hundreds of such evaluations in dozens of countries throughout the world, it offers practical insights on how to use this powerful technique, espe...

What guidance does academic research really provide to economic policy development? The critical and analytical surveys in this volume investigate links between policies and outcomes by surveying work from broad macroeconomic policies to interventions in microfinance. Asserting that there are no universal correspondences between policies and outcomes, contributors demonstrate instead that only an intense familiarity with the development context and the universe of applicable economic model...

Upon signing the Millennium Declaration in 2000, the international community committed itself to eight development goals with timebound targets and measurable indicators. The third of these eight goals was to "promote gender equality and empower women". The third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) in the Millennium Declaration has spurred national and international efforts to improve women's situation around the globe. Equality for Women: Where Do We Stand on Millennium Goal 3? tracks co...

How does education affect economic and social outcomes, and how can it inform public policy?Volume 3 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education uses newly available high quality data from around the world to address these and other core questions. With the help of new methodological approaches, contributors cover econometric methods and international test score data. They examine the determinants of educational outcomes and issues surrounding teacher salaries and licensure. And reflect...

Tax evasion is a complex phenomenon which is influenced not just by economic motives but by psychological factors as well. Economic-psychological research focuses on individual and social representations of taxation as well as decision-making. In this 2007 book, Erich Kirchler assembles research on tax compliance, with a focus on tax evasion, and integrates the findings into a model based on the interaction climate between tax authorities and taxpayers. The interaction climate is defined b...

Combining the insights of an economist and a political scientist, this new third edition of Cases in Public Policy Analysis offers real world cases to provide students with the institutional and political dimensions of policy problems as well as easily understood principles and methods for analyzing public policies.Guess and Farnham clearly explain such basic tools as problem-identification, forecasting alternatives, cost-effectiveness analysis, and cost-benefit analysis a...

Almost any economist will agree that education plays a key role in determining a country's economic growth and standard of living, but what we know about education policy in developing countries is remarkably incomplete and scattered over decades and across publications. Education Policy in Developing Countries rights this wrong, taking stock of twenty years of research to assess what we actually know—and what we still need to learn—about effective education policy in the places t...

The dominant policy response to economic crises over the past four decades has been the introduction of austerity--a mix of budget cuts and reforms to downsize the role of the state. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been the world's lender of last resort and leading advocate of austerity, and has been consistently chastised by policymakers and civil society for the consequences of its economic policy reforms on social protection. Critics of the IMF have identified so-called struct...