Emmanuel Jimenez

• World Bank

The challenge of sustaining economic growth over the long term is one that only a few countries have been able to surmount. Slowing momentum in countries like Malaysia and Thailand has led analysts and policy makers to consider what it would take to lift them out of middle-income status, where other countries have arguably become stuck. The paper e...

Adverse macroeconomic conditions and keen intersectoral competition for public funds have reduced the ability of LDC governments to continue expanding education. This article discusses three broad policy options which address the current crisis in education: recovering the public cost of higher education and reallocating government spending toward...

Cost-benefit analysis in education is an important tool in the economists'arsenal. However, it is essential that research, especially on the social benefits of education, make further progress to make cost-benefit more analysis. There is a need for more research on the effects of policy interventions on outcomes beyond access to a year in school an...

In recent years there has been burgeoning interest in how private transfers respond to household income, or “transfer derivatives”. Much of it is fueled by the specter of “crowding out”: the more responsive are private transfers, the more likely they could be supplanted by expansions in public transfers, weakening or destroying the latter's distrib...

This paper investigates how community management of schools can affect educational outcomes, such as retention and repetition rates. In our model, parents make decisions about whether their children should remain in school or not, and they monitor the performance of the teachers. To test the theoretical implications, we use a unique data set from E...

Using Korean balanced household panel data during 1995-1998, this paper investigates the inter-relationship between private and public transfers. One of the key findings is that the estimation results by a seemingly unrelated bivariate probit model show that private and public transfers are shown to be jointly determined before the crisis but not d...

To overcome market failures due to externalities or lack of an effective credit market, countries often try to improve access to education by providing more public school places. However, if there is already an active private sector, then some of the public expansion may draw away students who may have gone to school anyway. This would attenuate an...

This article examines how decentralizing educational responsibility to communities and schools affects student outcomes. It uses the example of El Salvador's Community-Managed Schools Program (Education con Participacion de la Comunidad, EDUCO), which was designed to expand rural education rapidly following El Salvador's civil war. Achievement on s...

One of the reasons why there is so little evidence concerning urban risk sharing is that the urban counterparts of data sets used by economists to study the rural sector are scarce. This article uses a data set from Colombia that contains extensive information about private transfers, household networks, and intra-annual earnings fluctuations that...

Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. The authors analyze newly available Polish household surveys, conducted both before and after Pol...

Incl. abstract, bibliographical references

Incl. abstract, bibliographical references

This paper tests for the motives for private income transfers. We consider two motives: altruism and exchange. The question of private-transfer motives is important because such motivation can influence the effects of public income transfers on the distribution of income. Using a household survey for Peru, we find that transfer amounts received inc...

We test for the motivation for private inter-household transfers of income by modeling transfer behavior under two alternative hypotheses: altruistic and exchange-motivated transfers. Knowing the underlying motivation for private income transfers is important because such motivation determines household responses to public income redistribution pro...

Do social security systems "crowd out" private transfers from younger to older generations? This question has generated much theoretical discussion, but little empirical work exists to confirm or refute this crowding-out hypothesis. The authors investigate the connection between social security and private transfers in Peru, using the Peruvian Livi...

Earnings functions have been widely used to estimate the returns to education and training; estimates have had a significant effect on the policy debate concerning educational investment. Many of these studies have relied on the Mincerian specification for the earnings function, which embodies several assumptions. This study uses data from a random...

Aside from revenue mobilization, one of the arguments for allowing the private sector to assume a larger role in the provision of education is that it would increase efficiency, as administrators become more responsive to the needs of students and their parents. But what is the evidence? Based on case studies that compare private and public seconda...

We estimate quality differences between private and public secondary schools in two developing countries: Colombia and Tanzania. Quality is measured by student performance on standardized achievement tests. We focus on the sample selection aspects of making quality comparisons. Estimated sample selection effects suggest that Colombian student sort...

Private interhousehold cash transfers are an important source of income in many developing countries. Among the countries whose experience is reviewed in the article, the proportion of all households receiving private transfers ranges from a fifth to a half. The amounts received are large, particularly when compared with the incomes of the poorest...

Private interhousehold cash transfers are an important source of income in many developing countries. Although precise transfer patterns are only beginning to be researched, the authors review the preliminary evidence from other studies and conduct original analysis based on the recent Peru Living Standards Survey. The paper reveals that private tr...

Using statistical methods to adjust for a bias in selectivity, this paper analyzes the relative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of public schools and two types of private schools - elite and non-elite - in the Dominican Republic. Controlling for selection, it found that students in eighth grade mathematics achieve more in both types of private...

A key consideration in the policy debate on the appropriate role of single-sex education in predominantly coeducational school systems is relative benefit for male and female students. This paper analyzes the relative performance of single-sex education and coeducation in Thailand in enhancing eighth-grade male and female student scores on standard...

A key consideration in the policy debate on the appropriate role of private schools in predominantly public school systems is cost effectiveness. The questions are: Do private school students learn more than their counterparts, and is it more or less expensive to educate students in private schools? Taking selectivity into account, the private scho...

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Cost-effectiveness is a key consideration in the policy debate on the appropriate role of private schools in predominantly public school systems. This article analyzes the relative performance of public and private schools in Thailand in enhancing eighth grade student scores in standardized mathematics tests, given student background and school cha...

This paper provides evidence regarding the relative effects of single-sex and coeducational school in enhancing eighth grade mathematics achievement in Thailand. It uses pre and post eighth grade test scores to estimate value added equations for single-sex and coeducational schools. The preliminary conclusions are the following. First, girls in sin...

In the highly centralized system of the Philippines, local funding provides the only source of flexibility to meet specific and urgent needs. The government in Manila, which pays all teacher salaries, finds it easier politically in times of fiscal belt-tightening to cut recurrent costs. Although local funds are a relatively small percentage of the...

Selection in post secondary education is highly competitive in many developing countries. Ability is often an important criterion, but economic and financial reasons may account for a bias against people from poor families. This paper uses Colombian data to examine the impact on equity if selection were based solely on ability. The resulting change...

Theoretical concepts suggest that decentralization in financing and managing education result in greater efficiency and additional resources. Taking advantage of a change in Pakistan from a nationalized to a decentralized system in 1979, the authors use this country as a case history to examine these concepts. While acknowledging the lack of data,...

The public sector in developing countries has traditionally played an important role in the financing of educational and health services. This review finds, however, that the share of public subsidies in these two sectors is not progressive, that is, proportionately higher for individuals in the lower socioeconomic groups. This distribution persist...

This paper develops and estimates an econometric model of the household demand for housing characteristics. The model is estimated using data from five cities and three developing countries. Overall, the procedures employed work well in a wide variety of circumstances. More specifically, it is found that: (1) Household willingness to pay for living...

Sustained growth in both incomes and life spans are the hallmarks of modern development. Fluctuations around trend in the former, or business cycles, have been a traditional focus in macroeconomics, while similar cyclical patterns in mortality are also interesting and are now increasingly studied. In this paper, I assess the welfare implications of...

Many economists criticize the concept of the composite commodity'of housing that forms the basis of modern urban economics. As a result, much empirical work has been produced that attempts to estimate the household demand for housing and locational characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the literature. The theoretical founda...

The tradeoff between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same tradeoff in the single-family housing market. For home buyers, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households, the choice about how much housing and which house to buy is a joint consumption/investment decision. Does this co...

Abstract Can Eastern European families most severely impoverished,during the transition to capitalism rely on private family safety nets? This question is likely critical for the transition's success, but little is known about family networks in Eastern Europe. We analyze newly available Polish household surveys, conducted both before and after Pol...

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