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Chart: Low-income countries lag behind in realizing progress in female school enrollment

From the World Development Report 2012.

For poor women and for women in very poor places, sizable gender gaps remain. In education, where gaps have narrowed in most countries, girls’ enrollment in primary and secondary school has improved little in many Sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia. School enrollments for girls in Mali are comparable to those in the United States in 1810, and the situation in Ethiopia and Pakistan is not much better.

Caste Disadvantage, or Gender and Urban bias? Educational Mobility in Post-reform India

Forhad Shilpi's picture

India experienced sustained economic growth for more than two decades following the economic liberalization in 1991. While economic growth reduced poverty significantly, it was also associated with an increase in inequality. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (2011) argue that Indian economic reform has been “unprecedented success” in terms of economic growth, but an “extraordinary failure” when it comes to improvements in the living standard of general population and social indicators. The contrasting news reports on billion dollar house (Mukesh Ambani’s house at Mumbai) and farmers’ suicides have brought the issue of income inequality to the spotlight for many people.  Does the increase in inequality in post-reform India reflect deep-seated inequality of opportunity or efficient incentive structure in a market oriented economy?

Schooling in Haiti: Persistent Challenges and Glimmers of Success at the 1-year Anniversary

Peter Holland's picture

 A school girl in Haiti.  Photo © World Bank
The one-year anniversary of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake gives us pause to reflect on the progress of the reconstruction efforts, despite the tremendous challenges the country has faced.   The human tragedies (one million still homeless, about 150,000 infected with cholera) compounded by the ongoing political standoff can be despairing.  Still, there are some glimmers of success that provide some motivation for those of us working to transform and modernize Haiti.  The findings from our recent working paper provide a bit more confidence that we are heading in the right policy direction in Haiti’s education sector.  Given the country’s data-scarce environment, this kind of objective reassurance is hard to come by, and very welcome. 

Talking development in two hundred years of books

Martin Ravallion's picture

  Photo: istockphoto.com
How long have we been talking about “economic development”? And what about concepts like “economic growth,” “poverty” and “inequality”? How old are they in the literature, and how has the frequency of their use changed over time?

We can now answer such questions thanks to a new software tool, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, introduced in a research paper by Jean-Baptiste Michel and others (13 authors are listed, plus the Google Books Team); the paper has just been published in the journal Science, and was picked up in the New York Times. The authors have formed a corpus of over 500 billion words (360 billion in English) from over 5 million books spanning 1800-2000.

Performance anxiety about the MDGs – are all poor countries lagging?

Delfin Go's picture

An old man, in Livingston, Zambia, stooped to scoop muddy water from a puddle into his pail. “What I want most is clean water,” he said, to me. I was conducting a World Bank field survey back in 2000 in Livingston. Even as the man expressed his desire for such a basic need, I could hear the roar of the mighty Victoria Falls just a few kilometers away. That was the sound of billions of gallons of fresh water, but not immediately drinkable. I never forgot the sound of it.

The extent to which people across the world have access to clean water, education, food, healthcare and other basic needs is measured by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of internationally agreed targets adopted in 2000. Last week, world leaders and the developmental community gathered in New York for the MDG summit to urge the international community to speed up progress toward the MDGs.