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Monitoring Works: Getting Teachers to Come to School
Abstract
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection as well as empirical evidence on the effects of patent rights. Then, the second part considers the international aspects of IPR protection. In summary, this paper draws the following conclusions from the literature. Firstly, different patent policy instruments have different effects on R&D and growth. Secondly, there is empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between IPR protection and innovation, but the evidence is stronger for developed countries than for developing countries. Thirdly, the optimal level of IPR protection should tradeoff the social benefits of enhanced innovation against the social costs of multiple distortions and income inequality. Finally, in an open economy, achieving the globally optimal level of protection requires an international coordination (rather than the harmonization) of IPR protection.
... Most public systems that require large numbers of rural-based field staff, such as health and education also face inherent difficulties of absenteeism, shirking and moonlighting due to difficulty in supervision of the field staff (Chaudhury et al., 2006;García-Prado & Chawla, 2006;Goldstein et al., 2010;Ramadhan, 2013;Fujii, 2019). The literature highlights various mechanisms such as decentralisation, performance monitoring and reporting structures and processes that have been attempted in the different systems to strengthen accountability (Anderson & Van Crowder, 2000;Devas & Grant, 2003;Smoke, 2003;Duflo & Hanna, 2005;Taylor, 2007;Birner & Anderson, 2007;Yilmaz et al., 2010). However, it appears that the potential of using diaries to strengthen accountability remains less explored. ...
... The existing literature highlights some attempts that have been made regarding the use of ICTs for strengthening accountability in public services that employ large numbers of rural-based field staff. In education, for example, cameras with a tamper-proof date and time function were used to monitor the attendance of teachers in rural schools (Duflo & Hanna, 2005). Similarly, Cilliers et al. (2013) piloted a mobile phone SMS-based monitoring system designed to improve teacher attendance. ...
... Since the diary records activities on each person-day, the field agents are held accountable when no activity is recorded. This finding corroborates with Duflo and Hanna (2005) who found that daily monitoring of teacher attendance was effective in reducing absenteeism. However, the authors state that regular monitoring is effective when coupled with incentives or punishments for non-attendance. ...
A well-managed and accountable agricultural extension service can play an essential role in realizing food security and improving rural livelihoods. However, for the majority of the developing countries, establishing an accountable agricultural extension system remains a challenge. Public agricultural extension services, in particular, have been highly criticized for weak accountability of field agents to both their supervisors and their clients. Public agricultural extension systems often deploy large numbers of field agents in geographically dispersed, remote areas, which makes supervision difficult. Typically, there is also a lack of resources and of robust mechanisms to enable both the supervisors and beneficiaries to adequately follow up the activities of the field agents and provide feedback, which contributes to problems of absenteeism of field staff. Due to resource constraints, central managers also face challenges to supervise the agricultural extension managers, who are the supervisors of the field agents. Taking Uganda as a case study, this thesis explores the use of new mechanisms for addressing these long-standing challenges of creating accountability in public agricultural extension services. The thesis had three objectives: (1) To design a diary for agricultural field agents, which should facilitate planning and supervision of agricultural extension service provision; (2) to assess the potential of different versions of this diary for strengthening accountability in public extension services; and (3) to analyze the performance of agricultural extension managers. To meet the first two objectives, three versions of a diary for agricultural field agents were designed. The first version was a diary in a paper format, which was specifically designed to match the system of planning and reporting applied in Ugandas public extension service. This version was then transformed into an electronic version of the diary (e-diary), which resembled an electronic questionnaire. Based on the assessment of these two diary versions, an improved e-diary was developed, which comprises a smartphone application to be used by the field agents, and a web-based system that allows extension supervisors to review the data entered by the field agents and provide them with feedback. Moreover, the system was designed in such a way that it is possible for extension supervisors to collect information from the beneficiaries for verification. For the assessment of the three different versions of the diary, a qualitative participatory research approach was applied. Data on the experience with using the diary was collected through a combination of focus group discussions and individual face-to-face interviews. The content analysis method was applied to analyse the data. The results suggest that a diary for agricultural field agents has a unique potential to strengthen accountability in public agricultural extension services. This is achieved through improving planning, reporting, monitoring and evaluation of extension activities and through reducing absenteeism as well as enabling of beneficiary feedback. The findings further indicate that, for the following reasons, an electronic version of the diary is more effective in strengthening accountability than a paper version: An e-diary can make use of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which allows extension supervisors to verify whether field agents actually conducted the activities that they indicate in the diary. Thus, an e-diary enables remote supervision, which reduces the time and costs of supervision. An e-diary also facilitates real-time reporting, which enables near real-time supervision, thereby increasing the frequency of supervision. However, the first e-diary version that resembled an electronic questionnaire had drawbacks, since it focused on data collection and had limited opportunities for feedback and interaction between the extension agents and their supervisors. However, the final e-diary version, which combines a smartphone app with a web-based system, made it possible to address this limitation. Expectedly, the assessment also revealed some limitations regarding the e-diary. Some of the users were initially apprehensive about the e-diary due to their limited experience with the use of smartphones. Consequently, the implementation of the e-diary necessitates intensive training of the users, which should not be underestimated. The results also showed that the use of the e-diary was affected by inaccessibility to electricity. Therefore, promoting the use of solar chargers or power banks in areas with poor electrification is recommended. Moreover, limited network coverage implies that the e-diary needs to be programmed in such a way that data can be entered off-line. Furthermore, the findings suggest the need to combine the implementation of the e-diary with incentives, such as awards of recognition. In view of the essential role that extension managers, as the supervisors of the field agents, play for accountability, an analysis of their performance was included as the third objective of the thesis. To meet this research objective, a quantitative research approach was applied. The main data source was the extension management system that was set up by the Ugandan Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industries and Fisheries (MAAIF). This system provides data on the timeliness of the submission of work plans and reports by the extension managers, which makes it possible to calculate measurable indicators of managers performance based on their expected roles and responsibilities. In addition to preparing descriptive statistics of such performance indicators, econometric models were estimated, using additional data from secondary sources on variables, which were hypothesized to influence the managers performance. The descriptive statistics of the performance indicators showed that the majority of the extension managers were not able to meet the performance requirements of MAAIF. The econometric analysis made it possible to identify factors that were associated with performance. The amount of the extension grant provided to the district and the ratio of extension workers to households were found to be key factors. The findings led to the recommendation to improve the performance of the extension managers through capacity building, especially in management, and through setting-up a strict performance monitoring system, to which the use of the e-diary could contribute. It was also recommended to increase funding to the districts and improve the ratio of extension workers to households so as to provide better working conditions and incentives to extension staff and their managers. Overall, the thesis indicates that diaries, especially electronic ones, in combination with monitoring systems for extension managers, offer a unique and largely underutilized potential to address entrenched problems of ensuring accountability in public agricultural extension services. It was also pointed out that additional accountability mechanisms will be useful to further strengthen accountability, in particular mechanisms that allow the beneficiaries of the extension service to provide direct feedback on the quality of service provision. The thesis also highlights the potential of using digital tools for strengthening both upward and downward accountability in public extension services. The findings of the thesis are likely to be relevant not only for agricultural extension services but also for other public services, such as rural health care and education, which face similar problems of managing large numbers of field agents in geographically dispersed, remote areas, where effective supervision is an inherent challenge.
... The existing literature highlights some ICT initiates regarding strengthening accountability in public services that employ large numbers of rural-based field staff. In education, for example, Duflo and Hanna (2005) reported on an intervention that used cameras to monitor the attendance of teachers in rural India. The time and date stamps on the photographs provided evidence for attendance, which was later used to compute financial incentives for the teachers. ...
... The GPS captures the actual location for which a particular activity is reported, therefore enabling the supervisors to track the activities of the different field agents conducted in different locations without necessarily traveling to those locations. The activity photo also provides additional evidence for the type of activity conducted as also reported by Duflo and Hanna (2005) and Henry et al. (2016), who found that photos constituted the major evidence in the supervision of teachers and health workers respectively. In addition, the beneficiary verification mechanism, which captures the phone numbers of the beneficiaries, can be used by supervisors to verify agents' reported activities as earlier suggested by Aker (2011) and Aker et al. (2016). ...
... The expectancy theory suggests that staff are more likely to be motivated when they believe that their efforts will be rewarded (Vroom, 1964). This finding is in line with Duflo and Hanna (2005) and Cilliers et al. (2014), who found that coupling monitoring with (financial) incentives was needed to increase teacher's attendance. ...
The study aimed to assess the potential of smartphone applications for strengthening accountability in public agricultural extension services. Therefore, a smartphone application called 'e-diary' was developed and tested in Uganda. A Design Science Research approach was used for the development and assessment of the e-diary. Individual face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions were used for data collection. Data analysis was conducted using the content analysis method. The findings indicate that smartphone applications have the potential to strengthen accountability in the public agricultural extension services by enabling remote supervision in real-time, which reduces the costs and time of supervision. However, the study also indicates that the successful implementation of such tools requires incentives such as awards of recognition. These findings contribute to the understanding of the potential role of ICTs in strengthening the management of public services (such as agricultural extension) in developing economies.
... A study by Miller et al. (2008) in the US estimates that each 10 days of teacher absence reduces students' mathematics achievement by 3.3% of a standard deviation. Duflo and Hanna (2005) show that a randomized intervention that reduced teacher absence from 36% to 18% led to a 0.17 standard deviation improvement in student test scores. There have been a number of innovative attempts to reduce absenteeism in state schools and health facilities. ...
... teacher absenteeism is not confined to a few bad apples, but is fairly widespread among teachers across age, gender, seniority, and pay grade, 29 in public and private schools alike (Duflo & Hanna 2005;Chaudhury et al. 2004). 30 With teachers' salaries and training and learning materials taking up 80% of the total education budget (Tewari 2015), these absences are associated with an enormous waste of the Indian state's already meager financial outlays on education. ...
... 30 With teachers' salaries and training and learning materials taking up 80% of the total education budget (Tewari 2015), these absences are associated with an enormous waste of the Indian state's already meager financial outlays on education. Teacher absences in India have been shown to seriously undermine the quality of learning, especially because the absence of a teacher in a single-teacher school results in the closure of the school (Duflo & Hanna 2005). A number of studies have sought to assess ways to improve absence rates of service providers. ...
... On the empirical side, treatment targeting has been investigated in job-training contexts, c.f., Berger 1 Manski (2005) studies planning problems which satisfy 'separability'and speci…cally mentions (page [10][11] budget constraints as a situation where separability is violated and, consequently, not studied by him. Attanasio, Meghir and Santiago (2011) and Du ‡o et al (2007)). ...
... costs of malaria infection on lost income. 10 Lucas (2007) who can a¤ord to purchase an ITN in the absence of any subsidy (because they have access to credit or are wealthy enough) will not bene…t from the treatment very much (i.e. their 0 (x) will be large and thus for them the di¤erence 1 (x) 0 (x) is likely to be small). ...
... An allocation rule that takes into account such heterogeneity could potentially generate important welfare gains. 10 Ettling et al. (1994) …nd that poor households in a malaria-endemic area of Malawi spend roughly 28 percent of their cash income treating malaria episodes. ...
This paper concerns the problem of allocating a binary treatment among a target population based on observed covariates. The goal is to (i) maximize the mean social welfare arising from an eventual outcome distribution, when a budget constraint limits what fraction of the population can be treated and (ii) to infer the dual value, i.e. the minimum resources needed to attain a specific level of mean welfare via efficient treatment assignment. We consider a treatment allocation procedure based on sample data from randomized treatment assignment and derive asymptotic frequentist confidence interval for the welfare generated from it. We propose choosing the conditioning covariates through cross-validation. The methodology is applied to the efficient provision of anti-malaria bed net subsidies, using data from a randomized experiment conducted in Western Kenya. We find that subsidy allocation based on wealth, presence of children and possession of bank account can lead to a rise in subsidy use by about 9% points compared to allocation based on wealth only, and by 17% points compared to a purely random allocation.
... This is the theory of impact of an 'ideal' direct programme; however, not all interventions would necessarily contemplate all these steps (this comment applies for all impact theories). Duflo and Hanna (2005) reported on a programme in India that used cameras with tamper-proof date and time functions to monitor daily teacher absence. A student in the class used the camera to take a picture of the teacher and the other students at the start and end of each school-day. ...
... Thus, the impact of monitoring by itself cannot be assessed with this design. In Duflo and Hanna's (2005) study, on the other hand, only treatment schools received both incentives and monitoring. ...
... Both programmes were successful in improving teacher attendance. Using a randomised design, Duflo and Hanna (2005) found that 42 per cent of teachers were absent in comparison schools against 22 per cent in treatment schools. Similarly, using a matched design, Cueto et al. (2008) found an improvement on teacher attendance in treatment schools by 17 days per year, compared to contrast schools. ...
This article reports on a systematic review of research on the effectiveness of interventions aimed at increasing teacher attendance in developing countries. After a comprehensive search process, nine studies met the inclusion criteria. Pooled effects sizes of included studies were estimated (with the exception of three studies that had unavailable information to calculate their effect sizes). Results show that direct interventions coupling monitoring systems with incentives and indirect interventions involving the community and parents in students’ education had statistically significant effects on teacher attendance, suggesting that close monitoring and attractive incentives are mechanisms of high potential to reduce teacher absenteeism.
... There were also cases where the use of sanctions was implied-for example, in the tamper-proof camera monitoring of teacher attendance, where salaries were tied to attendance (Duflo and Hanna 2005)-but where data on the use of sanctions were not provided. ...
... The tamper-proof camera and teachers' pay intervention examined by Duflo and Hanna (2005) had 'immediate and sustained' impacts on teacher presence in non-formal education centres: ...
This realist review addresses the question: ‘Under what circumstances does enhancing community accountability and empowerment improve education outcomes, particularly for the poor?’ Community accountability and empowerment interventions, it has been argued, improve educational outcomes by improving the quality of educational services and the participation of students and families in education. However, there has been no agreed understanding of what is meant by ‘community accountability’ or ‘community empowerment’ in relation to education. The range of interventions which, it has been claimed, affect accountability and empowerment, is broad, and evidence of impacts has been mixed.
Sixteen studies were identified that provided evidence of impacts on student-learning outcomes, in India, Indonesia, Uganda, Kenya, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Many of these studies also reported intermediate outcomes. An additional 14 studies were identified that identified enrolment, attendance, retention and/or year-repetition outcomes or intermediate outcomes such as reduced corruption and hence increased access to resources, improved teacher attendance, improved teaching and learning resources, improved facilities and so on.
There is a protocol for this review
... A szegénység elleni küzdelem pedig elsősorban azokban a segélyprogramokban ölt testet, amelyek a szegény országokban annyira szűkös fizikai és humántőke-elemek felhalmozását igyekeznek meggyorsítani, alapvetően segélyekkel. Ennek a megközelítésnek a hiányosságait meggyőzően mutatják be Abhijit Banerjee és Esther Duflo (2005) a "Handbook of Economic Growth" első kiadásának 7-ik fejezetében. 1981 1984 1987 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014 2017 Forrás: Világbank A 2019-es díjazott közgazdászok, Banerjee, Duflo és Kremer munkásságáról a Nobel-díj-bizottság a következőket emeli ki: 4 A három díjazott empirikus kutatásai átformálták a fejlődés-gazdaságtant. ...
... Miért vesznek igénybe alacsony és drága, ugyanakkor nem hatékony gyógymódokat? Munkáik általában arra világítanak rá, hogy az emberi viselkedés mozgatórugói a szegények világában nem térnek el attól, amire mikroökonómiai tanulmányaink alapján is számítanánk: az iskolai tanárok igen jól reagálnak a pénzügyi ösztönzőkre (Duflo et al. 2012); ugyanakkor több (jobb) tankönyv vagy az iskolában eltöltött több idő/nap önmagában nem vezet jobb tanulmányi eredményekhez, ezzel szemben az oktatás minőségének javulása igen! (Banerjee et al. 2007;Duflo et al. 2011;Duflo et al. 2015;Duflo -Hanna 2005). ...
... 16 There is limited information about absenteeism rates, but there is no obvious reason for absenteeism to be lower than in other low-income countries. High absenteeism rates and lack of instruction are problematic because the evidence indicates that this has a negative impact on student performance (Duflo et al 2008). This is coupled with evidence that instruction time has a positive impact on student performance (Woessmann 2003:139). ...
... Fourthly, recent attendance at teacher training does not lower absenteeism rates (Chaudury et al 2006). 18 Despite, the evidence of high absenteeism rates and limited instruction during school hours in government schools in low income countries, disciplinary action is rare, even though procedures for such action often exist (Chaudhury et al 2006;Duflo et al 2008). This problem will be extremely difficult to resolve in Burma, as the available evidence suggests that the factors contributing to high absenteeism rates and lack of instruction during school hours are common. ...
The following report evolved out of a three-day seminar, organised by MDG Myanmar, funded by AusAID and Union Aid Abroad held in Sydney between the 12 and 14 May 2012. This report doesn't provide a comprehensive analysis of problems in the provision of education for children nor does the report provide comprehensive policy solutions to the numerous serious problems in Burma’s education sector; rather it provides an overview of the problems in Burma’s schools and associated institutions as outlined by the participants at the seminar. Most of the participants at the seminar came from organisations, operating inside Burma and along the Thai- Burma border actively involved in the design and delivery of educational programs outside the government sector. There was general agreement amongst the participants that the education sector in Burma is performing extremely poorly, though there is very limited reliable research into the extent of the problems and their Government data that purports to represent the situation in
Burma’s schools are extremely unreliable, showing continual improvements in educational outcomes, which bear little relationship to the reality of the sector. Due to the paucity of research and reliable data, the problems in Burma’s schools are addressed with reference to recent empirical evidence on similar issues in other low-income countries. Research into the specifics of the problems into Burma’s education sector is necessary and an important contribution to any debate, but obviously research alone (even in the midst of recent political and economic reforms) will not resolve the problems arising from decades of neglect.
... Second, although corruption is present in both democracies and nondemocracies, the accountability of a democratic system is (at least theoretically) higher than that of a dictatorship (see for example Lederman, There is evidence that in some countries a large share of government spending in education is not actually going to education, and that there are huge problems with issues such as teacher absence (see for example Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan, andRogers 2006 or Duflo andHanna 2005). ...
... A second reason is that although corruption is present in both democracies and non-democracies, the accountability of a democratic system is higher than that of a non-democracy. In fact, there is evidence that in some countries a large share of government spending in education is not actually going to education (Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidharan and Rogers 2006;Duflo and Hanna 2005). If these factors are indeed playing a role, then for a given expenditure in education one can expect a higher education attainment in democratic countries than in nondemocracies. ...
... These findings matched to those found by Rockoff (2008), in New York City that monitoring program reduce teacher's absenteeism, and improve retention. Also the findings are in line with Duflo & Hanna (2005) in India that teacher's attendance improved when cameras to monitor attendance were introduced. Glewwe & Kremer (2006), in the country survey report that monitoring of teachers by school accompanied by disciplinary action reduces teacher's absenteeism evidenced a high rate of attendance. ...
This study was set out to investigate the impacts of teachers’ absenteeism to students’ academic achievements in
Tabora Municipal. It was specifically aimed at achieving the specific objectives namely: - to identify factors contributing to teachers’ absenteeism in public secondary schools in Tabora municipal. To examine the impacts of teachers’ absenteeism in Tabora municipal public secondary schools on students’ academic achievements. Finally, suggesting the way forward for solving the problems of absenteeism in public secondary school teachers in Tabora municipality.
Mixed methods approach was used, where questionnaire and focused group discussion methods were employed as methods for data collection. Teachers (70) were selected basing on purposive sampling technique and students (100) were selected by simple random sampling in which 230 were the targeted sample provided with the closed and opened questionnaires filled in. Quantitative data were analyzed by using Microsoft office excel software (MS- Excel 2007) and Statistical Package for Social
Sciences (SSPS) version 20.0. Descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation were calculated in order to make inference of the findings in which data were mainly presented in Percentages. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic Analysis.
Findings in this study revealed that personal factors for teachers’ absenteeism formed the highest rate (50 %) of absence followed by school factors (45.7%), environmental factors (1.4 %) and others (2.9 %) respectively. The findings from this study has described that the differences between male and female teachers’ absenteeism were marginal. Gender issue is not a significant factor to be used in predicting ones levels of absenteeism.
Majority of the school heads and school teachers viewed the levels of absenteeism among the single teachers and married teachers were low in their schools. Also teachers’ illness causes absenteeism. Teachers’ opinions on personal factors which influence teachers’ absenteeism as provided in table 4.4 and with the responses of those who agreed 35 (50%) teachers out of the 70 teachers noted that teachers’ illness causes absenteeism. Under focused group discussions with the school heads, it was also supported by 10 (100%) that teachers’ illness causes absenteeism, likely to pretending sick also becomes an issue to most teachers in terms of absenteeism.
... In this country, both schoolwide bonus programs-e.g. in New York (Springer and Winters, 2009;Fryer, 2011), in Chicago (Glazerman et al., 2010), and in North Carolina (Vigdor, 2008)-and individual teacher rewardse.g. in Nashville (Springer et al., 2010)-have not been found to have had a significant impact on student achievement. Experimental evidence from developing countries is more promising: bonuses aimed at both schools and individual teachers were found to improve teacher effort and student achievement (Duflo and Hanna, 2005;Muralidharan and Sundararaman, 2009;Glewwe et al., 2010). ...
Education spending has significantly increased in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) over the last few decades. Most education systems in the region have improved teacher salaries, introduced programs that focus on improving learning in the most disadvantaged schools, and systemic accountability. The available data suggests that increased spending combined with economic and social reforms has had an impact on educational outcomes such as improvement in primary and secondary completion rate and moderate but sustained progress in closing the learning gap with more developed countries. However, education systems in LAC still lag significantly behind most developed countries in terms of student performance in international assessments, which illustrates persistent learning gaps. Since education also consumes an increasing share of government expenditures, a constant concern among governments across the region is how to allocate education resources. In this context, school finance strategies offer policy tools to governments to increase efficiency in spending, increase learning, and narrow achievement gaps. Despite the relevance of school funding policies to improve educational quality and equity, there is little systematic analysis that compares education finances across Latin American countries. This conceptual framework aims to bridge this gap by providing a comprehensive description of the mechanisms through which school funding in LAC is governed, distributed, and monitored. This framework includes five key dimensions of school finance systems: (i) sources of funding and the transfers between different levels of government (i.e. national, subnational, local, and schools); (ii) decision-making authority at different levels of government; (iii) information and accountability systems; (iv) resource allocation rules; and (v) allocation of teachers. For each one of these dimensions, we review the relevant literature, collect information through the implementation of an extensive data collection instrument we developed, and provide comparative evidence of the school funding mechanisms in eight school systems from Latin America: The federal government of Argentina, the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), the federal government of Brazil, the State of Pernambuco (Brazil), the municipality of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and the national governments of Chile, Colombia, and Peru.
The main results of the study are presented along the five key dimensions presented above: (i) all systems reviewed have implemented compensatory funding using funds from the national level, however, they seem insufficient to compensate for the inequities in spending across subnational governments; (ii) overall school autonomy is low, with Colombia and Peru exhibiting the lowest levels and Chile the highest; (iii) all systems surveyed have introduced some accountability mechanisms to ensure that budget regulations are followed, including internal and external audits, and transparency laws. Regarding performance-based accountability, all LAC governments reviewed have introduced standardized assessments of students, schools, and/or teachers. However, they vary in the extent to which they publish school-level test results and in the extent to which financial consequences are tied to performance; (iv) most of the reviewed systems in the region have already introduced, or are evaluating the introduction of, objective criteria to increase transparency, efficiency, and equity in the distribution of resources. While there is limited evidence on the optimal design of funding formulas, the experiences of SEP in Chile and FUNDEB in Brazil show that these can be useful tools to increase funding equity; and (v) evidence relating to teacher allocation suggests that efficiency and equity challenges remain. Regarding efficiency, all the systems reviewed rely on face-to-face procedures to allocate hired teachers to schools whereas more advanced systems are using computer-generate
... To do that, however, the assumption is that local governments are at least fiscally capable, that is, they have sufficient revenue to cover the responsibility that are entrusted to them. There is again a large body of literature which indicates that this is not so -the revenue raising power of the local governments is limited, and 1 Banerjee, Deaton and Duflo (2004a,b); Kremer et al. (2005); Duflo and Hanna (2005). ...
... In this study the dependent variable is organizations performance and independent variable is training & development with Monitoring as a mediating Variable. Monitoring has positively impacted the performance outcomes or mediation effects has been reported in various other researches (Lyon, 1994;Dean & Kiu, 2002;Duflo & Hanna, 2005). Another implication of the agency theory is that it is also required to take greater account of psychological, behavioral and social factors so that it can be more useful for management practitioners to study the impact of monitoring (Loughry & Tosi, 2008) on employees' performances. ...
The purpose of this paper is to measure the impact of HRM on teachers' performance in the context of Pakistan. Impact of HRM practices on teachers' performance has been an under-researched area in Pakistan. For the human development of any society the major share of responsibility lies with the teachers of that society, so in this study, we have investigated how HR practices affect the teachers' performance. We proposed a mediation model in which monitoring acts as a mediating mechanism to transmit the positive effects of HR practices on teachers' performance. Therefore teachers' performance is an issue that if addressed adequately, can speed up the process of eliminating illiteracy from the country. This study examines the impact of HR practices i.e. training & development and performance management on performance of teachers of private schools, Karachi. Cross sectional data was collected from 135 private schools teachers of Karachi through structured questionnaires containing a five point Likert scale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor Analysis was performed to verify the reliability and validity of the measurement model. The findings of the research confirm that all HR practices included in the model except the evaluation in our study which is a significant predictor of teachers' performance. Thus, the contribution of this study for academics and practitioners is that HRM practices in educational sector will affect teachers' performance through HRM outcomes to increase the excellence of teachers as well as the overall quality of education.
... Their research generally point out that the drivers of human behaviour among the poor are not so different from what we would expect based on our microeconomics studies: school teachers are clearly responsive to financial incentives (Duflo et al. 2012) but at the same time, more (better) textbooks or more time (days) spent at school do not lead to better performance at school, whereas an improvement in the quality of education does. (Banerjee et al. 2007;Duflo et al. 2011;Banerjee et al. 2016;Duflo et al. 2015;Duflo -Hanna 2005). ...
Signed in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty signalled a new phase for
European integration and, within its framework, it laid the foundations
for the introduction of the euro and the creation of a monetary union.
Besides some political objectives, the centralisation of monetary policy
was a natural consequence of the experience of economic policy in that
period. The introduction of the single currency was the outcome of decades of attempts and adjustments to fix exchange rates, combined with
the institutional ideas prevalent in economic thought at the time. The
creation of the monetary union was underpinned by the fact that fixed
exchange rates had come to be seen mostly positively in the 1980’s, as
the reduction of exchange rate volatility across currencies boosted exports between countries. The uncertainties surrounding exchange rates
also convinced the decision-makers that no form of coordination would
eliminate exchange rate risk completely as long as there remained separate national currencies.
The Maastricht convergence criteria were formulated in the early 1990’s
with the objective of ensuring that only countries capable of functioning within an economic policy framework aimed at monetary stability
could join the monetary union. The introduction of the convergence
criteria was preceded by intense professional debates, since economists
were highly divided regarding the selection of appropriate conditions.
Some questioned the need for stipulating any criteria at all, while others argued that the introduction of the single currency would not, by
itself, guarantee monetary stability. The empirical studies into the real
economy indicators of the countries considered as optimal currency
— 20 —
From birth to the present – the first twenty years of the euro
areas versus the EU Member States did not, ultimately, find differences substantive enough to shatter the theoretical foundations of the euro.
It remains a problem, however, that the approved criteria formulate
targets only in terms of nominal variables and thus do not measure
real economic convergence directly nor guarantee financial stability.
Economic policy-makers wanted to set the boundaries for fiscal policy
along sustainability and stabilisation considerations. Yet the failure of
the budget deficit criterion to take the initial deficit figure into account
causes difficulties, as does the fact that few had recognised the lasting
impact of fiscal policy in boosting demand and thus no central fiscal policy instrument was created to smooth the economic cycles throughout
the currency area. The sustainability of government debt was also a
key consideration in defining the convergence criteria. It is problematic,
however, that the government debt rule is inconsistent with the deficit
rule and therefore the two rules cannot be properly applied together in
practice. After all, a deficit of 3 per cent can stabilise government debt
at the required level of 60 per cent only when nominal GDP grows by 5
per cent, i.e. the criteria are unable to take into account the changes in
the macroeconomic environment.
... Furthermore, countries provide different incentives, such as free lunch, to teachers and students to complement universal education. Many studies (Duflo, and Hanna, 2005;Omwami et al., 2011;Kremer and Vermeersch, 2005) suggest that these extra incentives improved school attendance and performance. This does not apply only to developing countries. ...
... A study by the U.S. Department of Education conducted in 2005 concluded that students who attend school regularly score higher on achievement tests than their students who are frequently absent (Bradly 2015). Duflo and Hanna's (2006) found fundamental relationship between teacher absenteeism and student outcomes. ...
The paper intends to examine the irregular attendance of students in their class and its relation to their academic achievement in five central campuses of Mid- Western University. This study followed descriptive study based on quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data were obtained from 172 students selected by non-proportional stratified sampling. Qualitative data were obtained from the campus chiefs, heads of instruction committees and teachers of the central campuses selected purposively. A mixed questionnaire was employed for quantitative data and open ended questionnaire was used to collect qualitative data. The study showed that near about half portion of respondents responded that they were sometimes irregular in their class. Few students (4.45%) who were never irregular belonged to the category of having knowledge of irregular attendance. Higher portion (29.57%) of the male students were always irregular than the female students. The high portion of Master's level students were always irregular than the Bachelor's level students. Chhetri students were always irregular than other castes. The higher percentage (23.07%) of 20 to 25 years’ age group students were always irregular than other age groups. The percentage of irregular students seemed higher in central campus of Humanities and Social Science, Education and Management. Majority of the participants pointed out that the University related factors are main reasons for their irregular attendance. The study showed that there is a positive significant relationship between class attendance of students and their academic achievement.
... Their research generally point out that the drivers of human behaviour among the poor are not so different from what we would expect based on our microeconomics studies: school teachers are clearly responsive to financial incentives (Duflo et al. 2012) but at the same time, more (better) textbooks or more time (days) spent at school do not lead to better performance at school, whereas an improvement in the quality of education does. (Banerjee et al. 2007;Duflo et al. 2011;Banerjee et al. 2016;Duflo et al. 2015;Duflo -Hanna 2005). ...
... Published work on child labour suggests that poverty is one of the major factors contributing to its occurrence (Basu and Van 1998;Basu 1999;Ray 2002;Schmitz, Traver, and Larson 2004;Naidu and Ramaiah 2006;Edmonds 2007;World Education 2009b;Ali, Ali, and Abbas 2017). It has been noted that in poor and developing countries where a large number of children work as labourers, factors such as: a lack of access to a credit market and job opportunities, less awareness among parents, particular socio-cultural practices, and an unavailability of appropriate study environments, have also all played a vital role in increasing the total number of child labourers (Menon, Pareli, and Rosati 2005;Naidu and Ramaiah 2006;Agbo 2017;Siddiqui and Patrinos 1995;Burke and Beegle 2004;Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan 2008;ILO 2018c). When families experience extreme poverty and a lack of access to resources, child labour is often considered to be a much-needed source of extra supportive income (Castle, de Groot, and Haitsma 2013). ...
This study examines how child labour carried out in Nepal’s brick kilns impacts classroom performance and achievement, while also exploring parents’ perspectives towards it. To this end, a field study within select brick kilns was conducted among child labourers as well as adults whose offspring had previously worked as child labourers. Information was collected through semi-structured interviews, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions. The findings of this study suggest that the majority of child labourers spend a part of their earnings on getting themselves or their siblings educated, which helps to the continuity of education. However, child labourer’s seasonal migration to brick kilns for employment impacts their ability to attend school, which leads to a deterioration of their classroom performance and final grades, while also producing higher drop-out rates. The majority of adult participants in this study held neutral views on both child labour and education. They did not deny the importance of education, yet also easily accepted child labour, considering it to be a necessity rather than a choice.
... Teacher absence varied across states in India. Many studies worldwide have shown that teacher absence affects learning gains and that absence is greater in poorer and disadvantaged neighborhoods (Clotfelter et al. 2007;Duflo and Hanna 2005). A longitudinal study in Andhra Pradesh, for example, indicated that teacher absenteeism showed little change with the introduction of teacher incentive bonus payments (Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2008). ...
Reduction of teacher and student absenteeism, together with consistent teacher support and training, are critical factors in improving the quality of education in rural India. As part of an ongoing project involving schools and educational centers in rural areas spread across 21 Indian states, this study investigated how implementation of two simple, accessible technologies could not only reduce absenteeism but also increase teachers’ effectiveness and improve student performance. In addition to students and teachers, key stakeholders included educational coordinators who provided support and monitoring regarding use of WhatsApp and two additional apps designed specifically to support simple educational improvements. In our study we coded and analyzed nine months of messages (n = 8968), both photographs and texts, posted by 26 participants. The number of text messages related to attendance was strongly positively correlated with frequency of interactions between coordinators and teachers. Our approach resulted in increased teacher and student attendance, as well as improvements in lessons and other planned educational activities. This model functions well in rural settings where there is poor internet connectivity and lack of supporting infrastructure. Remote schools can easily adopt this tablet-based model to reduce teacher absenteeism, improve teaching techniques, improve educational resources, and increase student performance.
... Teachers can be incentivized to adhere to the curriculum. Teacher incentives, a factor that economists take great interest in, have been much studied in the development context (Duflo, Hanna 2005;Glewwe et al. 2003). In sum, effective education policy may aim at a shift from supporting conventional learning inputs to non-conventional 'inputs' associated with parental and teacher behaviour. ...
... Incentives facing educators in developing countries are often weak in general (cf. World Bank, 2004;Chaudhury, Hammer, Kremer, Muralidaran, & Rogers, 2006;Banerjee & Duflo, 2006;Duflo & Hanna, 2005). Further, even motivated educators may focus on traditional responsibilities over health promotion. ...
... Glewwe et al (2003) undertake a randomized study in Kenya involving group incentives, and find that student test scores do indeed improve, but that teacher effort may suffer in other dimensions, as teachers were found to be 'teaching to the test'. Duflo and Hanna (2005) also undertake a randomized trial by installing tamper-proof cameras in Indian schools, coupled with high-powered financial incentives based on reported attendance of teachers. They find that attendance improved significantly, as did student achievement. ...
This paper examines the effort incentives of teachers in rural China. China employs a complex system of annual evaluations and promotions for civil servants in which good evaluations, along with a teacher's years of service and education, make teachers eligible to apply for rank promotions. A model of promotions is developed in which agents are both incentivized, and are sorted into ranks by ability. The model's predictions are then tested using panel data on teachers collected as part of the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF). We find that teachers respond to promotion incentives as predicted by the model: salary differentials are used to motivate teachers to work harder and teachers do work hard for promotions; teachers that are repeatedly passed over for promotions tend to slack off, as do teachers that have been doing well in the past; increased competition in the form of more teachers increases incentives when the probability of promotion is between 1/3 and 2/3; and effort is low when the probability of promotion is close to zero or one.
... In a study in India, schools where teachers' attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries made dependent upon attendance, absenteeism fell by 21 percentage points relative to the nonmonitored group (Duflo and Hanna, 2005;Duflo et al., 2012). In the schools where teachers were monitored, a student would take a picture of the teacher and the class at the start and end of the day, and a tamper-proof date and time function was used to verify the time and date. ...
Question
Please identify recent innovations and emerging best practices in donor approaches to address high rates of public service absenteeism.
Summary
Absenteeism affects a number of different sectors, but literature on public service absenteeism focuses predominantly on health and education. Notably, in recently published literature, there are a number of studies using randomised control trials to test interventions designed to address absenteeism. This helpdesk research report identifies and synthesises the findings of key studies, highlighting which interventions were found to have been effective or ineffective. It is important to note that interventions found to have been effective may not be effective in all contexts. They would not constitute best practice but can help guide policymakers towards interventions that are likely to be effective in future.
In addition to literature on specific interventions, this helpdesk report also highlights the key messages from guidance material on absenteeism, as well as emerging evidence which identifies factors that contribute towards absenteeism that could be used to inform future interventions.
... This reasoning is supported by research outside education contexts showing that job protection policies, like tenure, affect worker effort, measured by their absence behavior (Scoppa, 2010). In teaching, there is also some evidence that absence behaviors respond to financial incentives or various changes in absence policies (Duflo & Hanna, 2005;Stoddard & Kuhn, 2008). One study in Australia showed that teachers' absences positively correlated with their coworkers' ber of studies simulate the effects of more selective teacher retention or dismissal policies (Goldhaber & Hansen, 2010;Hanushek, 2009;Staiger & Rockoff, 2010;Rothstein, 2015;Winters & Cowen, 2013), referred to as "teacher deselection." ...
Debates over the efficacy of tenure are longstanding but tenure reform is now more prominent in the public eye given recent high-profile legislative battles in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. This focus on tenure also is a natural outgrowth of the large body of research showing that differences between individual teachers can have profound effects on student achievement. Some of the rhetoric in these debates centered on the systems’ inability to fire ineffective tenured teachers. Some contend that the high costs associated with the teacher dismissal process are tantamount to a guarantee that teachers won’t be fired for poor performance. Yet there are counterarguments that weakening tenure will lead to a lower quality teacher workforce. Similarly, others argue that the recent drop in individuals choosing to pursue a career in teaching is related to what’s being called the war against teachers, with tenure reform representing one front in that war (Goldstein, 2014). Our opinion is that direct empirical evidence fails to support the claim that the current wave of reforms affect the teacher labor market or student achievement.
... They also find positive spillover e↵ects among girls who were unlikely to win the scholarship and boys who were ineligible for the scholarship. Duflo and Hanna (2005) find that increasing teacher attendance in India increased student grades and improved their graduation rate by 62%. Schultz (2004a) suggest that the Progresa program, a conditional educational grant, in rural Mexico increased education by 10%. ...
Education and infrastructure are two important development strategies in low-income countries. They foster economic growth by improving labor productivity and facilitating market integration. Evaluating them poses a considerable challenge because schooling choices and infrastructure constructions are influenced by unobserved characteristics that bias OLS estimates. This dissertation uses appropriate natural experiment and instrumental variable strategies to study the effect of skilled emigration prospects on human capital investment, identify intersibling spillovers in education, and evaluate the impact of proximity to road on farm profits.
Chapter 1 focuses on a natural experiment that involves the recruitment of Nepali men of Gurkha ethnicity into the British Army to identify whether improved prospects for skilled emigration may stimulate human capital investment at home. While the recruitment originated during the British colonial rule in South Asia, a change in the education requirement for Nepali recruits in 1993 resulted in an exogenous, differential increase in their skilled versus unskilled emigration prospects. I use individual-level information on ethnicity, gender, and age to estimate positive effects on school attainment of Gurkha men. I extend this analysis in chapter 2 to study its impact on education of Gurkha women and estimate the net trade-offs between siblings??? human capital investments. While I find that eligible men responded to the rule change by raising their schooling by over one year, a 30 % increase over their average, part of the improvements in their education came at the expense of their female counterparts living in the same household, whose education decreased by 0.11 years.
In chapter 3, I estimate the benefits of having easier access to road on farm profits. I overcome endogenous selection in road placement by constructing an instrument based on a geographic feature. Because mountains in Nepal stretch in a north-south direction, the cheaper cost of constructing a north-south road relative to an east-west road to connect the district headquarters led to greater access for villages in north-south hinterlands relative to those in east-west hinterlands. I find that farmlands appreciate in value by 0.25 percent when the travel time to road decreases by 1 percent.
... In this study the dependent variable is organizations performance and independent variable is training & development with Monitoring as a mediating Variable. Monitoring has positively impacted the performance outcomes or mediation effects has been reported in various other researches (Lyon, 1994;Dean & Kiu, 2002;Duflo & Hanna, 2005). Another implication of the agency theory is that it is also required to take greater account of psychological, behavioral and social factors so that it can be more useful for management practitioners to study the impact of monitoring (Loughry & Tosi, 2008) on employees' performances. ...
The purpose of this paper is to measure the impact of HRM on teachers' performance in the context of Pakistan. Impact of HRM practices on teachers' performance has been an under-researched area in Pakistan. For the human development of any society the major share of responsibility lies with the teachers of that society, so in this study, we have investigated how HR practices affect the teachers' performance. We proposed a mediation model in which monitoring acts as a mediating mechanism to transmit the positive effects of HR practices on teachers' performance. Therefore teachers' performance is an issue that if addressed adequately, can speed up the process of eliminating illiteracy from the country. This study examines the impact of HR practices i.e. training & development and performance management on performance of teachers of private schools, Karachi. Cross sectional data was collected from 135 private schools teachers of Karachi through structured questionnaires containing a five point Likert scale. Exploratory and confirmatory factor Analysis was performed to verify the reliability and validity of the measurement model. The findings of the research confirm that all HR practices included in the model except the evaluation in our study which is a significant predictor of teachers' performance. Thus, the contribution of this study for academics and practitioners is that HRM practices in educational sector will affect teachers' performance through HRM outcomes to increase the excellence of teachers as well as the overall quality of education.
... In the rural areas the foremost factor related with lack of teachers participation to educational reforms is teachers absenteeism especially in public schools. The major reason behind this is inadequate incentives given to the teachers and weak monitoring system that strictly identify the flaws in education system (Chapman, 2002;Clotfelter, et al. 2008;Duflo and Hanna, 2005;Ehrenberg, et al. 1991). Without teacher there is no concept of class therefore the students get burdened with course work and also they have weak conceptualization about the certain course contents. ...
... Multiple studies highlight the impact of financial incentives. Duflo and Hanna (2005), for instance, find that a financial incentive program immediately reduced teacher absenteeism in rural India, which was also associated with an improvement in student test scores and achievement 1 year after the start of the program. Basinga et al. (2011) find in Rwanda that adoption of performance-based payment of health-care providers ("P4P") was related to improvements in the use and quality of child and maternal care services, including a 23% increase in the number of institutional deliveries and increases in the number of preventive care visits by children (56% for those Brought to you by | CAPES Authenticated Download Date | 7/17/15 10:58 PM 23 months and younger, and 132% for those 24-59 months), and improvements in prenatal quality as measured by compliance with Rwandan prenatal care clinical practice guidelines. ...
In recent years, experimental methods have been both highly celebrated, and roundly criticized, as a means of addressing core questions in the social sciences. They have received particular attention in the analysis of development interventions. This paper focuses on two key questions: (1) what have been the main contributions of RCTs to the study of government performance? and (2) what could be the contributions, and relatedly the limits? It draws inter alia on a new systematic review of experimental and quasi-experimental studies on governance to consider both the contributions and limits of RCTs in the extant literature. A final section introduces the studies included in this symposium in light of this discussion. Collectively, the studies push beyond polarized debates over experimental methods towards a new middle ground, considering both how experimental work can better address identified weaknesses and how experimental and non-experimental techniques can be combined most fruitfully.
... There is, however, limited detailed empirical evidence on the role of monitoring and accountability because one needs institutional variation to study the impact of monitoring. Existing work on the education sector indicates that monitoring can have large effects, for example on teacher absenteeism (Duflo et al.,2007) or on the management and fund allocation at the school of funds at the school level (Reinikka and Svensson, 2004). Evidence from behavioural experiments also suggests that how the monitor is appointed – for example whether he is elected by the community or not – has an effect on performance (see Barr et al. 2004). ...
Abstract 2 Most developing countries face important challenges regarding both the quality and quantity of health care they provide and there is a growing consensus that health workers play an important role in this. Although contemporary analysis of development emphasizes the central role of institutions, surprisingly little work looks at how institutions matter for health workers and health care delivery, which is the focus of this paper. One reason for the scarcity of work in this field is that it is unclear what the relevant theory is in this area. We carry out a formal exploratory analysis to identify both the problems and the institutional factors that offer an explanation. Using qualitative research on Rwanda, a country where health care problems are typical but where the institutional environment is dynamic enough to embody changes, we find that four institutional factors explain health worker performance and career choice. Ranked in order of ease of malleability they are: incentives, monitoring arrangements, professional norms and health workers ’ intrinsic motivation. We discuss their role and the implications for future research. Key words: health workers, institutions
... The absence of a multitasking tradeoff is also reported inDuflo and Hanna (2005), a field experiment conducted in schools in rural India. 5 Set 2 did not produce any more after three weeks of treatment because of a reduction in demand for the product. ...
Exploiting findings that losses loom larger than gains, studies have shown that framing manipulations can increase productivity of workers. Using a natural field experiment that exogenously manipulates wage bonuses within contests in a Chinese high-tech manufacturing facility, we show that how loss aversion affects worker behavior critically depends on the incentive scheme as well as the framing manipulation. Four sets of two identical teams competed against each other to win a bonus given to the team, within a set, with the higher average hourly productivity over the week. In each set, the bonus was framed as a reward or gain for one team and as a punishment or loss for the other. Average weekly productivity was slightly higher under the loss treatment, but this increase was statistically insignificant. However, the team under the loss treatment was at least 35% more likely to win the contest. As teams’ payoffs are based on relative productivity under a contest, framing effect is much stronger in terms of relative productivity. Finally, workers seemingly responded to the bonus by increasing the quality of production as well as quantity—defect rate fell as productivity increased.
... Further we need to minimize the potential bias generated by reverse causality from literacy to private school growth. While randomized experiments provide a good solution to the problem of endogeneity in general (e.g., see Duflo and Hanna, 2005), they cannot be used here since private school presence cannot be randomly allocated. ...
The present paper provides new evidence that private school growth is associated with both positive and negative externality effects respectively for literacy and enrolment rates in Indian districts. We exploit the district-level variation in the growth of new private schools over a period of time to show that districts with new private schools tend to have higher literacy and lower gender gap in literacy; but there is opposite effects for enrolment and gender gap in enrolment among 10-19 year olds: enrolment rates are lower, but gender gap in enrolment is higher especially among 10-14 year olds in the treated districts. We use difference-in-difference propensity score matching method to compare districts with and without new private schools over a period of time and argue that the opposite effects for gender gaps in literacy and enrolment can be attributed to the greater cost of enrolment vis-à-vis literacy in districts with new private schools in India.
... The program was designed by a nongovernmental organization and sought to give a financial incentive to a teacher for being present at school. The program was evaluated by international scholars Duflo and Hanna (2005). They report that the program immediately reduced teacher absenteeism and improved student achievement. ...
This study summarizes the empirical results of school-level research done in Georgia, one of the post-Soviet, Caucasian states, in October 2009. The findings drawn from qualitative and quantitative data describe current policies regarding teacher salaries and incentives in Georgia and identify future possible policy strategies aimed at the country's teacher profession. The paper stresses the importance of introducing more centrally planned as well as school-level incentives in Georgia. Data analysis shows that teachers in Georgia have mixed feelings regarding merit-based pay reform. If implemented, this type of reform would arrive too early since Georgia does not yet have the centralized system of teacher evaluation. Instead, all teachers may be rewarded additionally to give them economic stimulus and motivation for better performance.
... Experiments involving monitoring mechanisms and incentives could be implemented to reduce worker absenteeism and improve outcomes. For instance, Duflo et al. (2006) tested whether incentives linked to teacher presence in class could reduce absenteeism, and whether they promote teaching and student learning. Monitoring was introduced through the use of a camera operated by a student, who photographs the teachers as well as other students at the beginning and end of school day. ...
Achieving Millennium Development Goals in Africa requires a quantum leap in access to and quality of services. To this end, better diagnosis and understanding of both failures and successes in service delivery is crucial. In this paper, we review micro-level approaches to the study of service delivery. We focus on two types of service provider surveys--Public Expenditure Tracking Survey (PETS) and Quantitative Service Delivery Survey (QSDS)--which have been developed for empirical analysis of incentives, service provider behavior and the resulting efficiency and equity of public expenditures, key to producing good outcomes, such as improved welfare, health and education. We also examine Citizens Report Card Surveys (CRCS), in which users specify their experiences of service quality, and which are used as feedback mechanisms from users to service providers and policymakers.
... Averaging across countries, 35 percent of health workers were found absent. Banerjee and others(2004) and Duflo and Hanna (2005) confirm these findings. On misappropriation of public funds and drugs, see Reinikka and Svensson (2004) and McPake and others. ...
As policymakers in developing countries search for ways to improve health and education for the poor—which, in turn, would boost economic and social development— it is becoming clear that more is required than just additional funds. A key obstacle to better public services looks to be the weak incentives that providers face. Schools and health clinics are not open when they should be. Teachers and health workers are frequently absent from schools and clinics, and even when there, they spend significant time not serving the intended beneficiaries. Equipment, even when working, is not used. Drugs are misused, and public funds are expropriated. 4 As some observers argue, this evidence reflects failures in "street-level" institutions and governance—that is, in the relationships of accountability for providers. Although these failures directly hinder economic and social development, they have, until recently, received much less attention in the literature than weaknesses in macro institutions. In public service delivery, there are two vital relationships of accountability: provider-to-. 4 For anecdotal and case study evidence, see World Development Report 2004 (World Bank 2003). Chaudhury and others. (2006) provide systematic evidence on the rates of absenteeism in primary schools and health clinics in seven developing countries. The absenteeism rates are based on surveys in which enumerators made unannounced visits to the schools and clinics. Averaging across countries, 35 percent of health workers were found absent. Banerjee and others(2004) and Duflo and Hanna (2005) confirm these findings. On misappropriation of public funds and drugs, see Reinikka and Svensson (2004) and McPake and others. (1999).
Financial incentive programs for teachers are increasingly common, but little is known about the effectiveness of non-monetary incentives in improving educational outcomes. This field experiment measures how repeated public praise for the best teachers impacts student performance. In treated schools, the students of praised teachers perform better on standardized exams undertaken six months after the intervention. Praised teachers also assign higher marks to their students two months after the intervention. The students of teachers who are not praised in treated schools are assigned lower marks two months after the intervention, but they do not perform any worse on final exams. Compared to costly interventions where teachers receive financial incentives, the effects of public praise for praised teachers are remarkably large.
The paper summarizes main recent sociological, epistemological, methodological and ideological trends in modern economics and tries to evaluate its current state and further perspectives. Special attention has been paid to a change in economists’ methodological ideal: economic science began with trying to become like physics but actually has become like medical statistics. The paper’s general conclusion is that what we are witnessing today in modern economics is simply an ordinary working state rather than a triumph or a crisis. However, that state is not very promising since the period of new large theoretical ideas seems to be over for economics, the new atheoretical tendency in it is becoming stronger and in the very near future, economics is most likely to become more and more interventionist.
Many authors have argued that colonial institutions influenced contemporary economic outcomes by influencing levels of economic inequality and political conflict. Such accounts neglect an additional important mechanism, differences in state capacity. These two mechanisms of colonial persistence are examined in the context of India, where colonial land tenure arrangements are widely thought to influence contemporary outcomes through class conflict. However, land tenure institutions were also associated with differences in state capacity: In landlord-dominated areas, the colonial state had little or no presence at the village level. An analysis of agricultural outcomes in Indian districts, using a set of original measures of colonial state capacity, shows that while land tenure in isolation is a surprisingly weak predictor of agricultural success, state capacity has a strong and consistent positive association with 20th-century economic activity. The findings reinforce the importance of colonial rule in influencing contemporary state capacity and the importance of state capacity for development.
Background:
Most developing countries face important challenges regarding the quality of health care, and there is a growing consensus that health workers play a key role in this process. Our understanding as to what are the key institutional challenges in human resources, and their underlying driving forces, is more limited. A conceptual framework that structures existing insights and provides concrete directions for policymaking is also missing.
Methods:
To gain a bottom-up perspective, we gather qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with different levels of health workers and users of health services in rural and urban Rwanda. We conducted discussions with 48 health workers and 25 users of health services in nine different groups in 2005. We maximized within-group heterogeneity by selecting participants using specific criteria that affect health worker performance and career choice. The discussion were analysed electronically, to identify key themes and insights, and are documented with a descriptive quantitative analysis relating to the associations between quotations. The findings from this research are then revisited 10 years later making use of detailed follow-up studies that have been carried out since then.
Results:
The original discussions identified both key challenges in human resources for health and driving forces of these challenges, as well as possible solutions. Two sets of issues were highlighted: those related to the size and distribution of the workforce and those related to health workers' on-the-job performance. Among the latter, four categories were identified: health workers' poor attitudes towards patients, absenteeism, corruption and embezzlement and lack of medical skills among some categories of health workers. The discussion suggest that four components constitute the deeper causal factors, which are, ranked in order of ease of malleability, incentives, monitoring arrangements, professional and workplace norms and intrinsic motivation. Three institutional innovations are identified that aim at improving performance: performance pay, community health workers and increased attention to training of health workers. Revisiting the findings from this primary research making use of later in-depth studies, the analysis demonstrates their continued relevance and usefulness. We discuss how the different factors affect the quality of care by impacting on health worker performance and labour market choices, making use of insights from economics and development studies on the role of institutions.
Conclusion:
The study results indicate that health care quality to an important degree depends on four institutional factors at the microlevel that strongly impact on health workers' performance and career choice, and which deserve more attention in applied research and policy reform. The analysis also helps to identify ways forwards, which fit well with the Ministry's most recent strategic plan.
Field experiments -- randomized controlled trials -- have become ever more popular in political science, as well as in other disciplines, such as economics, social policy and development. Policy-makers have also increasingly used randomization to evaluate public policies, designing trials of tax reminders, welfare policies and international aid programs to name just a few of the interventions tested in this way. Field experiments have become successful because they assess causal claims in ways that other methods of evaluation find hard to emulate. Social scientists and evaluators have rediscovered how to design and analyze field experiments, but they have paid much less attention to the challenges of organizing and managing them. Field experiments pose unique challenges and opportunities for the researcher and evaluator which come from working in the field. The research experience can be challenging and at times hard to predict. This book aims to help researchers and evaluators plan and manage their field experiments so they can avoid common pitfalls. It is also intended to open up discussion about the context and backdrop to trials so that these practical aspects of field experiments are better understood. The book sets out ten steps researchers can use to plan their field experiments, then nine threats to watch out for when they implement them. There are cases studies of voting and political participation, elites, welfare and employment, nudging citizens, and developing countries.
The recent decades of poverty research have convincingly shown the value of a well-functioning health system in the development process. One of the ways in which poverty manifests itself is in the vicious cycle of ill-health and low income. Many studies have documented how temporary shocks to people’s health can have long-lasting effects on their welfare when healthcare is not available at affordable costs. Acknowledging this, more emphasis is now being placed on health outcomes as a primary policy goal across the developing world. The Millennium Development Goals notwithstanding, the Government of India (GOI) has always been a keen advocate of achieving good health among the general public.
The overall aims of this chapter are to compare the use of randomised evaluations in medicine and economics and to assess their ability to provide impartial evidence about causal claims. We will argue that there are no good reasons to regard randomisation as a sine qua non for good evidential practice in either science. However, in medicine, but not in development economics, randomisation can provide impartiality from the point of view of regulatory agencies. The intuition is that if the available evidence leaves room for uncertainty about the effects of an intervention (such as a new drug), a regulator should make sure that such uncertainty cannot be exploited by some party’s private interest. We will argue that randomisation plays an important role in this context. By contrast, in the field evaluations that have recently become popular in development economics, subjects have incentives to act strategically against the research protocol which undermines their use as neutral arbiter between conflicting parties.
Artículo1. Nivel de satisfacción de estudiantes y egresados de la Universidad Nacional de Asunción Artículo 2. Demanda de competencias laborales a egresados de la Universidad
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The universal accessibility movement has focused on solutions for people with physical limitations. While this work has helped bring about positive initiatives for this population, physical disabilities are just one of the many life situations that can complicate people’s ability to fully participate in an information economy and society. Other factors affecting accessibility include poverty, illiteracy, and social isolation. This paper explores how the universal accessibility movement can expand its efforts to reach other diverse populations. Four sets of resources are discussed—physical, digital, human, and social—that are critical for enabling people to use information and communication technology. Examples of how these resources can help people access, adapt, and create knowledge are provided.
What is the effect of an increase in a child's education on his/her siblings' education choice? The trade-offs among household members' key economic decisions, including human capital investment, is explored by household behavior models. These theoretical models identify numerous off-setting mechanisms that jointly determine the effect of a child's education on the education of other children in the household. As a consequence, whether this effect is positive or negative is an empirical question. This paper analyzes a unique natural experiment in Nepal where a change in the educa-tional requirement for the British Gurkha Army recruitment led to an exogenous increase in education among age-eligible Monglo-ethnic Gurkha men. The results suggest that an increase in the education of age-eligible Gurkha men decreased the education of Gurkha girls living in the same household by 0.11 years, which implies a decrease of 7% from their mean education of 1.56 years. The results show that having an age-eligible Gurkha men in the household, for whom educational returns went up, discouraged 5.1% of Gurkha girls from completing at least 1 year of education. Moreover, the estimated negative inter-sibling effect decreases with greater child spacing, increases with greater number of age-eligible male siblings, increases with household's involvement in agricultural production, and decreases with more remote access to school.
There about 490 million rural residents in China use solid fuels for cooking. Based on national population census data, this research evaluates the current situation and long-term trend of solid fuel use for cooking in rural China. Firstly, over three-fourths of all rural households depend on solid fuels to meet their cooking demand, while in urban area and township this figure is as low as 8% and 36% respectively. Secondly, solid fuel use was linked closely to rural household income, i.e., those regions with low per capita household income use more solid fuel. Furthermore, the proportion of rural households using solid fuel declined 17 percentage points in 2000-2010, albeit with some significant regional differences. Finally, the proportion of rural residents using clean fuels remained low, and the proportion using gas remained nearly constant over last 10 years in many provinces.
While the incidence of education on the determination of personal income has been well documented by scholars, the same is not true when it comes to the effects of education on economic growth, where different data sets and models have yielded contradictory results. This paper shows that a democratic environment is favourable to the impact of education on economic growth, even if democracy itself may not have a direct effect. This can be at least part of the explanation for why education alone, when observed in a cross section of countries, has shown mixed effects on growth.
This paper studies the performance of a methodology that can be used to evaluate the impact of new policies that radically depart from existing ones. It uses data gathered from a randomized schooling subsidy experiment in Mexico (i) to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, (ii) to forecast long-term program impacts that extend beyond the life of the experiment, and (iii) to assess the impact of a variety of counterfactual policies. The behavioral model is estimated using data on families in the randomized-out control group and in the treatment group prior to the experiment, both of which did not receive any subsidy. Child wages provide a valuable source of variation in the data for identifying subsidy effects. Using the estimated model, we predict the effects of school subsidies according to the schedule that was implemented under the Mexican PROGRESA program
Considerable controversy surrounds the impact of schools and teachers on the achievement of students. This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools. Unique matched panel data from the Harvard/UTD Texas Schools Project permit distinguishing between total effects and the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. While schools are seen to have powerful effects on achievement differences, these effects appear to derive most importantly from variations in teacher quality. A lower bound suggests that variations in teacher quality account for at least 7« percent of the total variation in student achievement, and there are reasons to believe that the true percentage is considerably larger. The subsequent analysis estimates educational production functions based on models of achievement growth with individual fixed effects. It identifies a few systematic factors a negative impact of initial years of teaching and a positive effect of smaller class sizes for low income children in earlier grades but these effects are very small relative to the effects of overall teacher quality differences.
This paper reports on a two-task principal-agent experiment in which only one task is contractible. The principal can either offer a piece-rate contract or a (voluntary) bonus to the agent. Bonus contracts strongly outperform piece-rate contracts. Many principals reward high effort on both tasks with substantial bonuses. Agents anticipate this and provide high effort on both tasks. In contrast, almost all agents with a piece-rate contract focus on the first task and disregard the second. Principals understand this and predominantly offer bonus contracts. This behavior contradicts the self-interest theory but is consistent with theories of fairness. Copyright The editors of the "Scandinavian Journal of Economics", 2004 .