Prioritizing Educational Investments in Children in the Developing World

David Evans and Arkadipta Ghosh ()

No 587, Working Papers from RAND Corporation Publications Department

Abstract: The authors bring together 40 randomized and non-randomized evaluations of education programs to compare cost-effectiveness, seeking to facilitate prioritization of different candidate interventions by policymakers. They examine cost-effectiveness across three outcomes (enrollment, attendance, and test scores) and find distinct "best interventions" for each outcome. For increasing enrollment, urban fellowships, school consolidation, and extra teachers have proven most cost effective. For school attendance, school-based deworming stands out as most cost effective. And for improving test scores, several interventions seem similarly cost effective, including providing blackboards, workbooks, training teachers, and others. They discuss some of the challenges inherent to comparing interventions.

Keywords: education; cost-effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O12 O15 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-hrm
Date: 2008-06
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2008/RAND_WR587.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ran:wpaper:587

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from RAND Corporation Publications Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Benson Wong ().