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IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF BASIC EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE YOUTH OF YEMEN POST ARAB SPRING
Get PDFThis paper looks at the issue of the quality of education in Yemen. It uses micro-data from TIMSS and from surveys conducted in underserved rural areas, as well as macro-level policy information from the System Assessment for Better Education Results (SABER) database. The analysis indicates that the availability of teachers and resources at schools, the monitoring and supervision of schools and parental involvement in schooling are important factors for better learning outcomes and avoiding trade-offs between expansion of enrollment and quality of learning. The paper suggests three types of reforms that can be carried out in the short run. First, it is necessary to systematically monitor teachers’ actual deployment and attendance in order to link the information with salary management and incentives. Second, there is a need to refine and scale up the existing implementation and monitoring mechanism for school grants to reward schools and communities that improve access for disadvantaged students and girls, and enhance the quality of learning. Third, there is a need to enhance transparency and accountability of school resources and results by disseminating a simple database that would include trends of basic indicators to monitor and compare progress at the school, district and governorate level.journal articl
Financial Restructuring after the 1997 Crisis and Impact of the Lehman Shock: Path Dependence of Financial Systems in Korea and Thailand
Get PDFAfter the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea (Korea) and Thailand implemented financial restructuring in a similarly successful manner and regained the healthiness of their banking sectors. However, when the Lehman shock hit their financial markets in 2008, its impact on the two countries was quite different. Korea, which had performed better in the financial restructuring than Thailand, was driven to the brink of a second financial crisis in 2008 while Thailand weathered the shock easily. This paper addresses this paradoxical contrast from the path dependence perspective, focusing on different historical paths of formation and change of the respective financial systems. It concludes that the successful state-led financial restructuringin Korea fostered banks’ propensity of active lending while the private sector-led reform in Thailand only reinforced banks’ conservative lending behavior. Furthermore, betraying the critical juncture theory, the severe economic crises helped reinforce the institutional legacies in the two countries, resulting in aggressive foreign borrowing by Korean banks and timid borrowing by Thai banks. These differences explain their contrasting vulnerability to the Lehman shock.research repor
A Fresh Look at Capacity Development from Insiders’ Perspectives:A Case Study of an Urban Redevelopment Project in Medellín,Colombia
Get PDFIn contrast to the current discussion on Capacity Development (CD), which is mostly made from the donors’ aid-effectiveness point of view, this paper attempts to explore what foreign donors can learn about CD by tracing the endogenous and long-running CD process from insiders’ perspectives. As a case study, an urban redevelopment project called MIB in Medellín City in Colombia is examined. After clarifying the initial context of urban poverty in Colombia, the paper traces the six phases of the MIB project: institutional preparation and awareness enhancement, conception of the inclusive-urbanism idea, planning of the MIB, construction/reconstruction of the residences, resettlement of residents, and scaling-up. Then the paper makes an in-depth analysis of the whole process, focusing on five key CD factors identified by Hosono et al. (2011): stakeholder ownership, mutual learning, specific drivers, scaling-up, and roles of external actors. From the analysis, the paper proposes four major lessons on CD research and practice in the future. First, we need to change our timeframe through which we look at the CD process. The MIB experience shows that the process can be far longer than what has been assumed by donors and researchers. Second, the current project-centered periodization of development assistance and the overwhelming focus on the project period should be reconsidered. In the MIB, the project implementation phase took only five years in a total process of 30 years. Third, the MIB case shows that documentation of previous projects and seminars, which occur in the pre-project phase under donors’ auspices, can greatly help local specialists conceive of new ideas. Fourth, the post-project phase also merits greater attention in identifying constraints to sustainability and replicability of the project concerned and to explore what external actors can do to overcome the constraints. The paper concludes by pointing out the necessity of accumulating similar kinds of case studies on the CD process made from insiders’ perspectives.research repor
FINANCE AND GROWTH IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: Policy and research challenges
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The Role of Infrastructure in Mitigating Poverty Dynamics:The Case of an Irrigation Project in Sri Lanka
Get PDFWhile it is known that access to physical infrastructure enhances household welfare, there are very few micro-econometric studies that analyze its role in mitigating chronic and transient poverty. This paper aims to bridge this gap in the existing literature by evaluating the impact of a large-scale irrigation infrastructure project implemented in Sri Lanka. It identifies the treatment effect of irrigation access by exploiting a natural experimental situation where the government used lotteries to randomly distribute irrigated plots. We extend the seasonal consumption smoothing model of Paxson (1993) by introducing endogenous credit constraints. By using unique household level monthly panel data over a period of two years, it is shown that the average income increases, and the probability of binding credit constraint declines with irrigation accessibility through which transient poverty is mitigated. These empirical results suggest that irrigation infrastructure has a positive impact on reducing both chronic and transient poverty directly and indirectly by improving income and relaxing credit constraints. The structural estimation results support the validity of our theoretical framework.research repor
機械産業におけるフラグメンテーションの進展と貿易コスト削減への政策的課題
Get PDF近年における新興国の貿易主導型成長は、繊維・衣服等の軽工業から機械部門等へと高度化しているが、その実態は、機械産業全体の生産設備移転というより、最も労働集約的な組み立て工程等のみが移転する形態となっている。このように製造工程全体を細分化し、国境を越えて配置再編を進めることで全体としての生産コスト最小化を達成する戦略は「フラグメンテーション」と呼ばれるが、この戦略を進める上では広義の貿易コスト――物理的な輸送インフラのみならず、インフラの運営、関税、ビジネス環境等を含む――の削減の重要性が指摘される。本稿では、特にフラグメンテーションが進む機械三業種（一般機械、電気機械、自動車・部品）に焦点を当てて、その貿易フローの規定要因を特定することで、今後の新興国の成長を促す上での政策的含意を導き出すことを目的としている。research repor
Introduction: HOW INDUSTRIAL POLICY CAN HELP AFRICA MEET THE CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY
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MEASURING POLICY PERFORMANCE: Can we do better than the World Bank?
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