Secondary

The educational attainment of Brazil's labor force, has gradually increased over the past two decades. At the same time, the government has pursued a series of economic structural adjustment policies. The authors investigate how these simultaneous advances have altered the relationship between labor market earnings, and education. They find that the returns to education in the labor market, fundamentally changed between 1982, and 1998.

The Development Committee reviewed the paper, Education for Dynamic Economies: Accelerating Progress Towards Education for All (EFA). The paper assessed progress and identified key issues and challenges in meeting the goals of universal primary education. It concluded that these goals were unlikely to be attained without accelerated action at the country level and a scaling up of international support.

While Africa has some of the world's strongest communities, service delivery tends to take place through functionality, and physically remote government structures. Despite important reforms that have taken place in many African countries in recent years, this remains especially true of education, where communities often continue to be neglected as partners in development.

This study identifies common issues, benefits and constraints regarding local government's education management and institutional change in Colombia. This was accomplished through case studies of four local education systems during two administrations (1995-1997 and 1998-2000): in the Department of Antioquia, the District of Barranquilla, the Municipality of Pasto and the Municipality of Pensilvania (a small rural municipality with less than 100,000 inhabitants).

Chilean education is a model other countries may aspire to, but what can a country learn from Chile's experience if it does not have relatively high per capita income, low levels of corruption, capacity for sustained learning assessments, cultural sensitivity about the poor, and affectionate behavior toward children? Students from countries as diverse as South Africa, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan, when asked what makes a good school, agreed on three things: good teacher-pupil relationships, support for overcoming learning difficulties, and good communications with parents.

The authors analyze the determinants of school attendance and hours worked by children in Pakistan and Nicaragua. On the basis of a theoretical model of children's labor supply, authors simultaneously estimate the school attendance decision and the hours worked by Full Model Maximum Likelihood. The author analyzes the marginal effects of explanatory variables conditioning on the latent status of children in terms of schooling and work. The authors show that these effects are rather different, and discuss the policy implication of this finding.

Over the past decades, child malnutrition in Ethiopia has persisted at alarmingly high rates. By applying the conditional nutrition demand approach to household data from three consecutive welfare monitoring surveys over the period 1996-1998, this study identifies household resources, parental education, food prices, and maternal nutritional knowledge as key determinants of growth faltering in Ethiopia.

The causes and consequences of child labor are examined within a household decision framework with survival uncertainty and endogenous fertility. The data come from a nationally representative survey of Indian rural households. The complex interactions uncovered by the analysis suggest that mere prohibition of child labor, or the imposition of school attendance, would make things worse, and would be difficult to enforce.

The study focuses on secondary education issues, particularly the supply, and demand factors affecting student attainment, and performance. It explores the main challenges resulting from the rapid expansion in secondary education enrolments, in terms of access, equity, quality and financing, and, presents policy options to address them. The report looks at access to primary education, which appears not to be a problem, and examines the growing demand for secondary education. However, its completion rates, raises major questions regarding system efficiency.

The study explores the interactive clash resulting from reforms, and institutional capacity at the provincial level, as the main element to explain current limitations, and to suggest recommendations conducive to further social reform.