Education, Institutions and Economic Development

A large share of children in low income countries learn little and complete their primary education lacking even basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills. We review the experimental literature on teacher effort, knowledge, and skills – areas we argue are crucial to raise the quality of education in low income countries – and show that little is still known about effective ways to address the huge shortcomings observed in these three dimensions of teacher quality. We further argue that attention to local and national implementation constraints, several them of institutional character, are urgently called for to complement the growing experimental literature and identify core questions and issues for future research.

Authors: Tessa Bold and Jakob Svensson