The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a severe blow to human capital. This report presents new evidence and analysis to provide a comprehensive diagnostic of the effects of the pandemic on human capital outcomes and identify promising policy responses for governments faced with the task of rebuilding human capital in the wake of the pandemic.

Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an enormous shock to mortality, economies, and daily life. But what has received insufficient attention is the impact of the pandemic on the accumulation of human capital—the health, education, and skills—of young people. How large was the setback, and how far are we still from a recovery? Collapse and Recovery estimates the impacts of the pandemic on the human capital of young children, school-age children, and youth and discusses the urgent actio...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby p...

Upon signing the Millennium Declaration in 2000, the international community committed itself to eight development goals with timebound targets and measurable indicators. The third of these eight goals was to "promote gender equality and empower women". The third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) in the Millennium Declaration has spurred national and international efforts to improve women's situation around the globe. Equality for Women: Where Do We Stand on Millennium Goal 3? tracks co...

Perceptions of Africa have changed dramatically. Viewed as a continent of wars, famines and entrenched poverty in the late 1990s, there is now a focus on "Africa rising" and an "African 21st century." Two decades of unprecedented economic growth in Africa should have brought substantial improvements in well-being. Whether or not they did, remains unclear given the poor quality of the data, the nature of the growth process (especially the role of natural resources), conflicts that affect pa...

Our population is aging. What will we do about it?Due to population explosion and a global increase in average life expectancies, an unprecedentedly high percentage of the world′s population is aging. By the middle of this century there will be up to 2 billion individuals over the age of 65, a demographic shift never before experienced in our human history. In addition, declining birth rates in industrialized countries means a decrease in the number of adults under...

This book explores a new method of monitoring the quality of urban life, combining objective and subjective information to assess quality of life by using the market price of housing and individuals' life satisfaction in six Latin American cities: Bogota, Buenos Aires, Lima, Medellin, Montevideo and San Jose. Housing prices show how the market values characteristics of not only a house itself, but also its surroundings. Life satisfaction, though less measurable, can be approximated using a si...

This publication presents tools and techniques for measuring service delivery in health and education and people's experiences from the field in deploying these methods. It begins by providing an introduction to the different methodological tools available for evaluating the performance of the health and education sectors. Country specific experiences are then explored to highlight lessons on the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of using different techniques to measure quality in...

For anyone wanting to learn, in practical terms, how to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, the Handbook is the place to start. Designed initially to support training courses on poverty analysis, it consists of explanatory text with numerous examples, interspersed with multiple-choice questions (to ensure active learning) and combined with extensive practical exercises using Stata statistical software. The sixteen chapters cover the measurement of poverty and poverty li...

This book presents some basic theoretical concepts of public finance with a particular emphasis on its impact poverty reduction. Eight case studies from Latin America and Africa illustrate how these concepts are applied in practice and the implementation issues that emerge.

The sizeable increase in income inequality experienced in advanced economies and many parts of the world since the 1990s and the severe consequences of the global economic and financial crisis have brought distributional issues to the top of the policy agenda. The challenge for many governments is to address concerns over rising inequality while simultaneously promoting economic efficiency and more robust economic growth. The book delves into this discussion by analyzing fiscal policy and its...

Updated insight into key facts impacting on financial institutions after the financial crisis, highlighting areas of major policy and academic interest. The book includes ten chapters analysing contrasting issues such as intellectual capital, cost efficiency, bank stability, credit risk and business models for the wealth management industry.