How to improve education outcomes most efficiently? A review of the evidence using a unified metric
Noam Angrist,
David K. Evans,
Deon Filmer,
Rachel Glennerster,
Halsey Rogers and
Shwetlena Sabarwal
Journal of Development Economics, 2025, vol. 172, issue C
Abstract:
Many low- and middle-income countries lag far behind high-income countries in educational access and student learning. Policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education with limited resources. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper provides the most recent and comprehensive review of the literature on effective education programs, with a novel emphasis on cost-effectiveness. We analyze the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions from over 200 impact evaluations across 52 countries. We use a unified measure — learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS) — that combines access and quality and compares gains to an absolute, cross-country standard. The results identify programs and policies that can be up to an order of magnitude more cost-effective than business-as-usual approaches. Examples of some of the most cost-effective approaches include targeting instruction to students’ learning level rather than grade as well as structured pedagogy approaches. These results can enable policymakers to improve education outcomes substantially more efficiently.
Keywords: Education; Cost–benefit analysis; Government policies; Impact evaluations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H43 H52 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387824001317
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:172:y:2025:i:c:s0304387824001317
DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2024.103382
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig
More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().