The World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report on Education: a sceptic’s review

October 18, 2017
Guest post from Prachi Srivastava (@PrachiSrivas), Associate Professor in the area of education and international development at the University of Western Ontario. When the World Bank announced that the 2018 World Development Report (WDR) would be on education, I was sceptical. I’m not denying the Bank’s research expertise. It devotes substantial money and staff and has a trove of reports that
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What have we learned on getting public services to poor people? What’s next?

March 24, 2014
Ten years after the World Development Report 2004, the ODI’s Marta Foresti reflects on the past decade and implications for the future Why do so many countries still fail to deliver adequate services to their citizens? And why does this problem persist even in countries with rapid economic growth and relatively robust institutions or policies? This was the problem addressed
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When/how does aid help Africa’s public services work better?

June 4, 2013
I seem to be spending most of my life at the ODI at the moment, largely because it is producing an apparently endless stream of really useful research papers and seminars. Yesterday saw a combo of the two, as it launched Unblocking Results: using aid to address governance constraints in public service delivery (OK, maybe it still has a thing
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The trouble with targets: what would happen if we won all our campaigns?

May 4, 2011
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What can Sweden teach us about successful development?

September 7, 2010
What, if anything, can today’s developing countries learn from Sweden? That’s the question that a new paper by Ari Kokko, published by the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, seeks to answer. Sweden is particularly relevant because up until well into the 19th Century, it looked very much like a developing country: dependent on agriculture, forestry and mining,
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Is The Economist going socialist?

February 4, 2009
The back half of The Economist (business, finance and economics) is having an excellent crisis. If you’re willing to filter out the gratuitous (and increasingly defensive) neoclassical riffs, there is some really excellent analysis in there and even some (perhaps inadvertent) progressive thinking. This week’s edition includes a three page briefing on the Asian economies and a handy summary of the
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