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This report presents the findings of the Service Delivery Indicators in the education sector in Togo in 2013. Survey implementation was preceded by extensive consultation with Government and key stakeholders on survey design, sampling, and adaptation of survey instruments. Pre-testing of the survey instruments, training of field staff, and field-work took place in 2013. Information was collected from 200 primary schools, 1,141 teachers, and 1,938 grade four pupils in Togo. The results provide a representative snapshot of the quality of service delivery and the physical environment within which services are delivered in public primary schools. The survey provides information on three levels of service delivery: measures of: (i) teacher effort; (ii) teacher knowledge and ability; and (iii) the availability of key inputs, such as textbooks, basic teaching equipment, and infrastructure (such as sanitation, quality of lighting et cetera). The results indicate an adequate number of teachers to serve the population's needs, but they lack the necessary skills and inputs. Absence rate is a factor, although relatively lower than in other countries, except during teacher strikes. The reliance on volunteer teachers also creates challenges as only the present discounted value of future earnings can be considered a source of motivation for them.1 Efforts are needed in all major dimensions surveyed (competence, absence rate, inputs), although recent textbook provision efforts appear to have already made an impact.

Curriculum & Instruction --- Education --- Education Indicators and Statistics --- Human Development --- Infrastructure --- Textbooks

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Using a unique longitudinal data set collected from primary school students in Pakistan, this paper documents four new facts about learning in low-income countries. First, children's test scores increase by 1.19 standard deviation between Grades 3 and 6. Second, going to school is associated with greater learning. Children who drop out have the same test score gains prior to dropping out as those who do not but experience no improvements after dropping out. Third, there is significant variation in test score gains across students, but test scores converge over the primary schooling years. Students with initially low test scores gain more than those with initially high scores, even after accounting for mean reversion. Fourth, conditional on past test scores, household characteristics explain little of the variation in learning. To reconcile the findings with the literature, the paper introduces the concept of "fragile learning," where progression may be followed by stagnation or reversals. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of several ongoing debates in the literature on education in low- and middle-income countries.

Conditional Cash Transfers --- Dropout Rate --- Education --- Education For All --- Education Indicators and Statistics --- Fragile States --- Learning Outcomes --- Poverty --- Primary Education

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The number of countries that regularly participate in international large-scale assessments has increased sharply over the past 15 years, with the share of countries participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment growing from one-fifth of countries in 2000 to over one-third of countries in 2015. What accounts for this increase? This paper explores the evidence for three broad explanations: globalization of assessments, increasing technical capacity for conducting assessments, and increased demand for the microeconomic and macroeconomic data from these assessments. Data were compiled from more than 200 countries for this analysis, for six time periods between 2000 and 2015, yielding more than 1,200 observations. The data cover each country's participation in each of six cycles of PISA as it relates to the country's level of economic development, region, prior experience with assessment, and OECD membership. The results indicate that the odds of participation in PISA are markedly higher for OECD member countries, countries in the Europe and Central Asia region, high- and upper-middle-income countries, and countries with previous national and international assessment experience; the paper also finds that regional assessment experience is unrelated to PISA participation.

Country strategy & performance --- Education --- Education indicators and statistics --- Education policy and planning --- Effective schools & teachers --- Law and development --- Learning assessment --- Poverty monitoring & analysis --- Poverty reduction --- Primary education --- Secondary education --- Tax law

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COVID-19-related school closures are pushing countries off track from achieving their learning goals. This paper builds on the concept of learning poverty and draws on axiomatic properties from social choice literature to propose and motivate a distribution-sensitive measures of learning poverty. Numerical, empirical, and practical reasons for the relevance and usefulness of these complementary inequality sensitive aggregations for simulating the effects of COVID-19 are presented. In a post-COVID-19 scenario of no remediation and low mitigation effectiveness for the effects of school closures, the simulations show that learning poverty increases from 53 to 63 percent. Most of this increase seems to occur in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries, especially in East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and South Asia. The countries that had the highest levels of learning poverty before COVID-19 (predominantly in Africa and the low-income country group) might have the smallest absolute and relative increases in learning poverty, reflecting how great the learning crisis was in those countries before the pandemic. Measures of learning poverty and learning deprivation sensitive to changes in distribution, such as gap and severity measures, show differences in learning loss regional rankings. Africa stands to lose the most. Countries with higher inequality among the learning poor, as captured by the proposed learning poverty severity measure, would need far greater adaptability to respond to broader differences in student needs.

Coronavirus --- COVID-19 --- Education --- Education and Digital Divide --- Education For All --- Education Indicators and Statistics --- Effective Schools and Teachers --- Learning Poverty --- Pandemic Impact --- Primary Education --- SDGs --- Sustainable Development Goals

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Carbon pricing is increasingly used by governments to reduce emissions. The effect of carbon pricing on economic outcomes as well as mitigating factors has been studied extensively since the early 1990s. One mitigating factor that has received less attention is education quality. If technological change that reduces the reliance of production on emissions is skill-biased, then carbon pricing may increase the skill premium of earnings and subsequent wage inequality; however, a more elastic skill supply through better education quality may mitigate adverse economic outcomes, including wage inequality, and enhance the effect of carbon pricing on technological change and subsequently emissions. A general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model is proposed, with endogenous skill investment in which the average skill level of the workforce can affect the need for emissions in an aggregate production function. This study uses data on industrial emissions linked to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies dataset for European Union countries. The findings show that, within countries, cognitive skills are positively associated with employment in industries that rely less on emissions for production and in industries that, over time, have been able to reduce their reliance on emissions for production. In the estimated general equilibrium model, higher cognitive skills reduce an economy's reliance on emissions for production. Having higher quality education-defined as the level of cognitive skills attained by workers per unit of cost-increases the elasticity of skill supply and, as a result, mitigates a carbon tax's economic costs including output loss and wage inequity, and enhances its effect on emissions reduction. The implication is that investments in education quality are needed for better enabling green technological innovation and adaptation and reducing inequality that results from carbon pricing.

Carbon Policy and Trading --- Carbon Pricing --- Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases --- Education --- Education For All --- Education Indicators and Statistics --- Education Quality --- Emission Reduction --- Environment --- Learning Outcomes --- Skills Development --- Skills Development and Labor Force Training --- Social Protections and Labor