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82. The High Return to Private Schooling in a Low-Income Country
- Author:
- Tessa Bold, Mwangi Kimenyi, Germano Mwabu, and Justin Sandefur
- Publication Date:
- 12-2011
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Existing studies from the United States, Latin America, and Asia provide scant evidence that private schools dramatically improve academic performance relative to public schools. Using data from Kenya—a poor country with weak public institutions—we find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation. This finding is robust to endogenous sorting of more able pupils into private schools. The magnitude of the effect dwarfs the impact of any rigorously tested intervention to raise performance within public schools. Furthermore, nearly two thirds of private schools operate at lower cost than the median government school.
- Topic:
- Development, Education, Government, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- Kenya, United States, Asia, and Latin America
83. Les madrasas chiites afghanes à l’aune iranienne : anthropologie d’une dépendance religieuse (The Afghan Shiites Madras in the Iranian news: the anthropology of religious dependance)
- Author:
- Fariba Adelkhah and Keiko Sakurai
- Publication Date:
- 01-2011
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI)
- Abstract:
- As a social institution, the madras must be analyzed in terms of their relationship to social, econmomic and political change and to the public educational system whose bureaucratic organization they have copied. In the case of Afghanistan they cannot be disassociated from the war and its consequences, such as emigration and the reconstitution of ethno-religious affiliations. Financed and run by the diaspora, they enable the Shiite minority, notably Hazara, to reestablish itself in the central State and to provide a counterweight to the Pachtoune domination. They also contribute to the education of girls and children from disfavored social classes. The dependeance of Shiite education in Afghanistan on the Iranian clergy has organizational, theological, financial and symbolique benefits. But it is accompanied by a reinvention of, and separation from, the Iranian model which should, in the minds of the religous authorities, lead to a national schism in Afghanistan of which Kaboul hopes to be the spiritual capital. The asymetric Irano-Afghan interaction illustrates the relevance of the notion of « religous dependence ».
- Topic:
- Education, Religion, War, Ethnicity, and Anthropology
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, Iran, Middle East, and Asia
84. WSC 5: Protecting People, Economies, and Infrastructure
- Author:
- Christine Lynch, Devon Tucker, Michael Harvey, and Jacqueline McLaren Miller
- Publication Date:
- 02-2009
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- EastWest Institute
- Abstract:
- Drawing on a diverse array of opinions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, the EastWest Institute's Fifth Worldwide Security Conference brought together specialists from the spheres of policy, academia, and civil society. Participants addressed a variety of issues on the contemporary global security landscape. These ranged from specific security threats (whether illicit trade, the targeting of critical infrastructure or cyber crime) to the role of interested actors (such as business, NGOs, and media), as well as a focus on potential strategies to counter terrorism and extremism (either in terms of constructing global cooperative architectures or, more controversially, the possibility of opening dialogue with the terrorists). A variety of policy recommendations emerged from each session—detailed in the main body of the report—but there were several recurring themes binding the debate together and animating the core arguments of proceedings as a whole. These policy recommendations were not necessarily consensus recommendations but reflected a wide range of debated policy prescriptions.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Security, Economics, Education, Globalization, Human Rights, International Security, and Political Theory
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America
85. Empowerment of Dalits and Adivasis Role of Education in the Emerging Economy
- Author:
- Narendra Jadhav
- Publication Date:
- 11-2009
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for the Advanced Study of India
- Abstract:
- Well, ladies and gentlemen, I feel greatly honored to have been invited to deliver this inaugural keynote lecture in the Nand Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture series for this international conference on India's Dalits. I am indeed grateful to my friend Professor Devesh Kapur, Director of CASI, and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania for providing me this opportunity to participate in this conference on a theme that has been very close to my heart. I understand that the Nand Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture series comprises public lectures on contemporary India that will stimulate a dialogue on campus. Given this focus of the distinguished lecture series and the fact that this also happens to be the inaugural keynote lecture for this International Conference on India's Dalits, I have chosen to share some thoughts with you this evening on the theme of “Empowerment of Dalits and Adivasis: Role of Education in the Emerging Indian Economy.”
- Topic:
- Development, Economics, and Education
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
86. Islam in Uzbekistan: Religious Education and State Ideology
- Author:
- Martha Brill Olcott and Diora Ziyaeva
- Publication Date:
- 07-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Abstract:
- Islam in Uzbekistan: Religious Education and State Ideology is the fourth paper of the ongoing series on Islam in Central Asia. It provides a historical overview of religious education in Central Asia, focusing on the hujra system and its founders, and assesses the efforts of the Uzbek government to define the content of Islam that has been presented in public life since independence was obtained in 1991. It examines the presentation of Islam in the schools—especially in Tashkent Islamic University, seen as the premier training institution for secular teachers of Islam—and the presentation of Islam in the mass media.
- Topic:
- Civil Society and Education
- Political Geography:
- Central Asia, Asia, and Uzbekistan
87. The Determinants of Child Weight and Height in Sri Lanka: A Quantile Regression Approach
- Author:
- Harsha Aturupane, Anil B. Deolalikar, and Dileni Gunewardena
- Publication Date:
- 05-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- United Nations University
- Abstract:
- Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is a large literature that investigates the determinants of child malnutrition, it focuses almost exclusively on mean effects of these determinants. However, socioeconomic background variables and policy interventions may affect child nutrition differently at different points of the conditional nutritional distribution. Using quantile regressions, this paper explores the effect s of variables such as a child's age, sex and birth order; household expenditure per capita; parental schooling; and infrastructure on child weight and height at different points of the conditional distributions of weight and height using data from Sri Lanka's Demographic and Health Survey. Results indicate that OLS estimates can be misleading in predicting the effects of determinants at the lower end of the distributions of weight and height. For example, even though on average Sri Lankan girls are not nutritionally-disadvantaged relative to boys, among children at the highest risk of malnutrition girls are disadvantaged relative to boys. Likewise, although expenditure per capita is associated with strong nutritional improvement on average, it is not a significant determinant of child height or weight at the lower end of the distribution. Similarly, parental education, electricity access, and the availability of piped water have larger effect son child weight and height at the upper quantiles than at the lower quantiles. The policy implication is that general interventions—parental schooling, infrastructure and income growth—are not as effective for children in the lower tail of the conditional weight and height distributions. These children, who are at the highest risk of malnutrition, are likely to need specialized nutritional interventions.
- Topic:
- Development, Education, and Health
- Political Geography:
- Asia and Sri Lanka
88. Higher Education Reservations and India's Economic Growth: An Examination
- Author:
- Gurpreet Mahajan
- Publication Date:
- 09-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
- Abstract:
- In 2006 the Indian Parliament passed legislation reserving an additional 27 percent of seats in all institutions of higher learning, funded by the central government, for the category of socially disadvantaged groups officially known as "Other Backward Classes." At a time when India is opening its economy to global competition, this initiative has re-ignited the debate on the efficacy of reservations and triggered fresh anxieties about the impact of this policy on India's economic growth.
- Topic:
- Democratization, Economics, Education, and Globalization
- Political Geography:
- India and Asia
89. No Way Out: An Assessment of the Romani Community in Georgia
- Author:
- David Szakonyi
- Publication Date:
- 02-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI)
- Abstract:
- The Romani community is the most marginalized and disadvantaged ethnic community in Georgia. Although accurate estimates are hard to establish, the population is thought to number up to 1,500 persons, living in multiple small settlements across Georgia. Extreme poverty, unemployment, lack of education and health care, and isolation from larger society comprise several of the major problems the community as a whole is facing. The overall situation for the Roms in Georgia has significantly deteriorated since the Soviet period, leaving the population practically devoid of any means to lift themselves out of their often devastating circumstances.
- Topic:
- Education, Ethnic Conflict, Health, and Poverty
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Asia, Soviet Union, and Georgia
90. Skilled Emigration and Skill Creation: A quasi-experiment
- Author:
- Satish Chand and Michael Clemens
- Publication Date:
- 09-2008
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Center for Global Development (CGD)
- Abstract:
- Does the emigration of highly-skilled workers deplete local human capital? The answer is not obvious if migration prospects induce human capital formation. We analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded exoduses of skilled workers from a developing country. Mass emigration began unexpectedly and has occurred only in a well-defined subset of the population, creating a treatment group that foresaw likely emigration and two different quasi-control groups that did not. We use rich census and administrative micro data to address a range of concerns about experimental validity. This allows plausible causal attribution of post-shock changes in human capital accumulation to changes in emigration patterns. We show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji; they moreover raised the stock of tertiary educated people in Fiji—net of departures.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Education, Markets, and Migration
- Political Geography:
- Asia and Australia/Pacific