This note provides an overview of South Africa's education system and learning outcomes. It reviews early childhood development, basic education, and higher education (university education and vocational training). It is a review of available research in support of the South Africa Systematic...

This paper examines how the dismantling of coercive institutions associated with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 affected the istribution of rents from natural resource exports. It identifies the interplay between coercive institutions and natural resource rents as an important...

This study assesses the redistributive impact of fiscal policy -- including expenditures and taxation -- in the Arab Republic of Egypt. Using a broadly applied methodology, a fiscal incidence analysis is conducted using survey and government data for fiscal year 2015. Evidence shows that...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...

This paper argues that labor supply elasticities encode information about the determinants of income inequality. In the theoretical framework, individuals choose labor supply conditional on productivities and preferences for consumption relative to leisure. The paper shows that reduced-form...

This paper uses methods developed by the Commitment to Equity Institute and data from the Household Budget Survey to assess the effects of government taxation and social spending on poverty and inequality in Moldova. The paper presents the first detailed distributional analysis of the tax and...

The pattern of economic rates of return to investments in education can help us to understand the benefits of schooling. It was common knowledge that the returns to education were highest for the primary level of education and lower for subsequent levels. Recent evidence suggests that the...

The goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and working toward a more equal distribution of income are prominent in international development and agreed upon in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 10. Using data from 164 countries comprising 97 percent of the world's...

This study assesses the redistributive effects of fiscal policy in Mali and Niger. Fiscal policy is poverty increasing in Mali (by 2.4 percentage points) and Niger (2.5 percentage points). This is a result of primarily two factors: indirect taxes (value-added taxes and import duties) and direct...

This paper characterizes the trade-off between the income gains and the inequality costs of trade using survey data for 54 developing countries. Tariff data on agricultural and manufacturing goods are combined with household survey data on detailed income and expenditure patterns to estimate the...