International development

This paper provides new evidence on the recent performance of piped water consumption subsidies in terms of pro-poor targeting for 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Our results suggest that in these countries, existing tariff structures fall well short of recovering the costs of service provision, and that, moreover, the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve the goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water among the poor.

Youth unemployment in Ghana increases in parental wealth. This occurs because, without unemployment insurance, only workers with sufficiently high parental wealth can afford to remain unemployed, and do so to search for scarce, high-productivity jobs.

This report presents the main findings of the project “Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''.

Making lumpy human capital investments is difficult, particularly since returns may accrue with a significant time lag.

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries?

This paper provides new evidence on how effectively piped water consumption subsidies are targeting poor households in 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world.

This brief addresses the fiscal response to the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that governments could make use of the opportunities this shock provides to make changes to tax systems now that might be politically difficult later.

Nearly one-quarter of married, fertile-age women in Sub-Saharan Africa say that they want to avoid pregnancy but are not using contraceptives.

We examine how the effects of incentivizing individuals to use healthcare depend on the capacity of the health system.

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disavantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.

Using a cluster randomised controlled trial, we evaluated a psychosocial stimulation intervention, comprising weekly home visits for 18 months, in urban slums of Cuttack, Odisha, India.

Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor.

Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate two approaches to improving the quality of Colombian preschools.

This study is among the first to rigorously demonstrate potential of life skills interventions to change key outcomes of adolescent girls living in contexts where girls and women continue to be caught in a vicious cycle of low levels of human capital, low labour force participation rate, low wages, low bargaining power within the household, early marriage and high fertility.

Do tax systems distort firm-to-firm trade? Using data from both firms that do and don’t pay VAT in West Bengal in India, this paper shows that they can have significant effects, contributing to highly segmented supply chain networks.