During the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), enrollment ratios in primary education grew substantially in the first decade under dictatorship, but stagnated in the mid-1970s. This paper shows that education spending might depend on the levels of centralisation in tax matters. Using panel data regressions and qualitative evidence, we argue that a massive big push industrialisation programme increased the pressure on external accounts, leading the government to intensify an export incentive policy based on tax subsidies that decreased the income of subnational governments. As a result, the capacity of funding mass education was compromised in the second half of the 1970s.

We investigate the effect of water quality on the educational outcomes of children aged 8–11 in 39 districts in five states in the Ganges Basin of India. Using data from the Centre for Pollution Control Board of India and the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011–12, we study the effect of water quality in the Ganges Basin on the performance in three test scores. Our evidence suggests that faecal coliform levels in water sources above safety thresholds negatively affect reading and writing test scores. The effects of Nitrate-N and Nitrite-N in the water appear to be weaker compared to those of faecal coliform. The results establish that water pollution caused by excessive presence of faecal coliform is an important environmental factor in determining educational outcomes of children. High levels of faecal coliform in the water could be lowering cognitive abilities of the pollution-affected children through the channel of waterborne diseases.

The government of Uganda introduced an education reform that eliminated school fees for primary school-age children in 1997. This paper finds that an increase in education, generated by the reform, has a positive impact on women's empowerment. Specifically, an increase in schooling, due to the reform, improves women's involvement in decision making within the household by increasing their likelihood of having a final say on issues related to their own health, about large household expenses, and regarding visits to family or relatives. Education enhances women's cognitive ability but has no impact on women's labor market opportunities and attitudes toward gender-based violence.

The current challenge of education systems is learning. Across low-income countries (LICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMCs), 62 % of 10-year-olds could not read at a minimally sufficient level in 2015. This study provides an overview of recent spending on education and its correlation with learning outcomes. We show that the relationship between education spending and learning is historically weak. From 2000 to 2015, LICs and LMCs increased spending on education in primary schools by ~$137 per student, an 80 % inflation-adjusted increase, with no corresponding change on the average learning outcomes. We then conduct a benefit-cost analysis of candidate interventions that could increase learning at low cost. Two interventions – structured pedagogy and, teaching at the right level, with and without a technology component generate large benefit-cost ratios. If deployed uniformly to reach 90 % of the 467 million students in LICs and LMCs, these interventions would cost on average $18 per student per year or $7.6 billion annually, generating $65 in benefits for every $1 spent. The economic logic behind this finding is that the hard and costly work of getting children into primary schools has mostly been accomplished, leaving open the possibility of learning interventions that improve the efficiency of the existing education system at low cost. Our results show that increasing education expenditure by just 6 % could increase learning by 120 % if directed toward these highly cost-effective interventions.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of poverty-trap regimes in Mexico, that is, self-reinforcing mechanisms in which municipalities which start poor remain poor. We develop a coordination game of poverty traps driven by strategic interactions of economic agents: people choose to complete or not their education levels since it might be excessively costly and unprofitable. A one-shot game is constructed and then converted into a system of differential equations in which strategies that perform relatively better become more abundant in the population. Applying evolutionary games and symbolic-regimes dynamics (nonparametric and nonlinear techniques), we show that Mexican regions are in poverty-trap regimes (stable and dynamically evolving low-level equilibria) characterized by incomplete education and low income since initial conditions (education and income per capita) are such (very precarious) that poverty is the stable steady-state situation. We examine scenarios to show that to overcome the high-poverty regime by the year 2030, it is necessary to reduce incomplete education by 10% in the 5-year periods 2020–2025 and 2025–2030 and increase per-capita income by 10% in both periods.

Higher education enrolment and graduation rates have increased rapidly inter-generationally across much of the world, offering employers the promise of more knowledgeable recruits and promising individuals new means of social advancement. In the case of Bolivia, the labour force is becoming more heterogeneous over time, which could imply positive effects induced by a closer match between labour supply and recruiters’ needs. However, we show that this is not the case. We revisit the transition mechanisms from college to the workplace, positing recruiters’ interpretations of educational credentials as a crucial determining factor for employability in the formal sector. In a two-branch correspondence study, 2848 fictitious CVs were sent to 1424 formal firms in the three main urban Bolivian areas. We find a large university reputation premium. Applicants from well-valued universities are around 40% more likely to receive a positive response – a 2.25 percentage point advantage from a 7.87% baseline likelihood. Thus, the increasingly heterogeneous labour force is generating additional informational frictions in the labour market, rather than promoting a more efficient matching process.

Historical literacy in Spain is characterised by enormous regional disparities and important differences by sex. This paper addresses these issues, focusing initially on the 1887 census returns and also making use of local empirical data and of in-depth interviews of elderly informants. The goal is to propose an interpretation of historical patterns of literacy based, to a large extent, on the existence of important differences in the perceived value of literacy and education, very high in some regions and very low in others. The author argues that these cleavages go beyond the importance of economic structures, have deep historical roots and continue to be present in contemporary Spain despite the substantial growth in educational attainment taking place during this past century.

This paper presents a new dataset of enrolment rates and grade distribution ratios (GDR) in Brazil between 1933 and 2010, in addition to enrolment rates and GDR of Brazilian states from 1955 to 2010. To our knowledge, there are no previous estimates of enrolment rates by states for such a long period in Brazil. Enrolment rates and GDR in northern and north-eastern states were meagre and comparable to the lowest Latin American performers, and even the most advanced Brazilian states lagged behind the early leaders of the region, such as Argentina and Uruguay, until the turn of the century. Given a certain enrolment rate, Brazilian states were expected to present lower GDR compared to Latin American countries on average.

This study looks at human capital in Spain during the early stages of modern economic growth. We have assembled a new dataset for age-heaping and literacy in Spain with information about men and women from six population censuses and forty-nine provinces between 1877 and 1930. Our results show that, although age-heaping was less prevalent during the second half of the 19th century than previously thought, it did not decline until the early 20th century. Given that literacy increased throughout the whole period, our study thus unveils stark differences between age-heaping and literacy, which raises further questions regarding sources, methods and interpretation.

There is growing evidence that early life conditions are important for outcomes during adolescence, including cognitive development and education. Economic conditions at the time children enter school are also important. We examine these relationships for young adolescents living in a low-income drought-prone pastoral setting in Kenya using historical rainfall patterns captured by remote sensing as exogenous shocks. Past rainfall shocks measured as deviations from local long-term averages have substantial negative effects on the cognitive development and educational achievement of girls. Results for the effects of rainfall shocks on grades attained, available for both girls and boys, support that finding. Consideration of additional outcomes suggests the effects of rainfall shocks on education are due to multiple underlying mechanisms including persistent effects on the health of children and the wealth of their households, underscoring the potential value of contemporaneous program and policy responses to such shocks.

In 1940, the Portuguese government approved a massive primary school construction plan that projected a 60 per cent increase in the number of primary schools. Based on the collection of a new dataset, we describe literacy levels in Portugal prior to the plan as well as the plan's strategy regarding the location of schools. We then estimate the causal impact of the increase in the number of schools between 1940 and the early 60s on enrolment and literacy, all at the county level. We conclude the increase in the number of schools was responsible for 80 per cent of the increase in enrolment and 13 per cent of the increase in the literacy rate of the affected cohorts.

UK labour productivity is significantly lower than that of many other similarly advanced economies and has been so for decades, with negative implications for UK living standards. To make matters worse, during the last ten years labour productivity growth has stalled in most industrialised countries, and particularly in the UK. This has led to a renewed policy focus on productivity growth, as evidenced by successive government productivity plans and efforts to re-invigorate industrial strategy. This paper reviews the evidence on UK productivity performance, identifying what we know about the causes of its weakness, what we do not know and what this means for policy. We review the evidence through the lens of developments in economic measurement, drawing in particular on the work of National Institute colleagues past and present, and with a view to the key measurement challenges ahead that, unlocked, will help us understand better what is holding back UK productivity.

There is an enduring belief by UK policymakers that a large higher education sector is an important driver of long-run economic growth, which has been part of the narrative since the Robbins Report. Back then, there was plenty of conjecture and assumption, but strikingly little concrete evidence to support such a belief. This paper asks whether the evidence base has strengthened in the 50 years since it was published. It looks at a number of different growth equation specifications and, using international education data, attempts to draw out the contribution of both the number of, and the growth in, graduates since the 1960s. There are three main findings. Firstly, many growth relationships, including those estimated elsewhere in the literature, are quite sensitive to the countries included – which often depends on the variables used – and time period of analysis. I argue that, given these issues, growth equations should always be treated with caution. Secondly, and remembering this caveat, neither the increase nor the initial level of higher education is found to have a statistically significant relationship with growth rates both in the OECD and worldwide. This result is robust to numerous different specifications. Thirdly, there is some evidence, consistent with the existing literature, that levels of technical skills at the end of compulsory education matter. The employment of higher level technical skills (proxied by the number of employed researchers in an economy) is also a strong predictor of growth. This gives a possible mechanism linking the output of (some) of the higher education sector with economic growth. However, it does not imply that mass higher education necessarily leads to higher growth. This depends on the skills produced by an expanding tertiary sector and their utilisation (or underutilisation) in the jobs available to increasing numbers of graduates.