Lant Pritchett
Biographic Data
| ID | 1471256 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lant Pritchett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lant |
| FAMILY NAME | Pritchett |
| SIGNATURE | PRITCHETT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | World Bank |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3736-3118 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 842 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Raising the bar: An inclusive global poverty line
Investing in Human Capital in Africa: A framework for research
This essay argues that the existing paradigm in discussions of the acquisition of human capital has been focused on the drive to universal schooling and expanding access and grade attainment. This focus has been quite successful. The expansion of schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the last decades has been impressively rapid, in percentage growth terms much faster than other regions of the world, because SSA at political independence bega…
Multilateralism and Development Cooperation: The End of an Interesting Era
My argument is that while enormous progress has been made during the post–World War II “development era” during which there was substantial multilateral and bilateral development cooperation, or “foreign aid,” that era is coming to a close. The main driving forces of the end of the relevance of development cooperation to the overall development endeavor is that the politics of the rich Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countr…
Forum: Why and How the Public vs. Private Schooling Debate Needs to Change
Are private schools better than public schools?" This ubiquitous debate in low- and middle-income countries is the wrong one to have. The foreword and three essays collected in this Forum each explore how to move past the stuck "public vs. private" binary. Jason Silberstein is a Research Fellow at RISE. His foreword is titled "A Shift in Perspective: Zooming Out from School Type and Bringing Neighborhood Education Systems into Focus." It summariz…
Learning equity requires more than equality: Learning goals and achievement gaps between the rich and the poor in five developing countries⋆
Whereas the MDG was a simple schooling goal the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a number of targets for learning. Target 4.1 specifies not just that all children complete primary and secondary school but that this schooling leads to "relevant and effective learning outcomes" and Indicator 4.1.1 tracks progress goal using the proportion of children reaching "minimum proficiency" at early (grade 2/3), intermediate (primary complete) and l…
A structured model of the dynamics of student learning in developing countries, with applications to policy
Learning trajectories vary amazingly widely across countries, regions, and individual students in dynamic ways. In this paper we develop a parametrized structural model of the dynamics of the learning process and use the model for suggestive policy applications. We first synthesize the existing empirical literature on learning profiles, which suggest a clear set of parameters that formally characterize the learning process. We then calibrate this…
Effective investment in women's futures: Schooling with learning
Women's schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Yet countries vary widely in the extent to which a year of schooling conveys useful skills and knowledge and hence schooling and education cannot be treated as synonyms. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries we show the association of …
The future of jobs is facing one, maybe two, of the biggest price distortions ever
Discussions of the future of jobs are concerned that technological change will displace labor and particularly jobs. In this work it is rarely remarked on the strangeness that some of the most globally scarce factors of high level technical expertise, capability to innovate, and entrepreneurial talent are devoted to economizing on – reducing the demand for – one of the most globally abundant factors: low to medium skill labor. I show that policy …
Aiming higher: Learning profiles and gender equality in 10 low- and middle-income countries
Global education goals have many aims, among them universal basic schooling, universal literacy and numeracy, and gender equality. We use unique, nationally representative data on adult learning outcomes to examine the link between schooling and literacy in ten low- and middle-income countries. We simulate scenarios of increasing school grade attainment, increasing learning per year, and achieving gender equality, and examine learning outcomes in…
Girls’ schooling and women’s literacy: Schooling targets alone won’t reach learning goals
Using the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data on the ability of women at various levels of schooling attainment to read a simple sentence, we show that reaching universal completion of grade six among girls would not bring the world anywhere close to the goal of universal female literacy. These calculations are based on the empirical relationship between grades completed and ability to read, a descriptive ‘learning profile.’ The large litera…
The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers
Large international differences in the price of labor can be sustained by differences between workers or by natural and policy barriers to worker mobility. We use migrant selection theory and evidence to place lower bounds on the ad valorem equivalent of labor mobility barriers to the United States, with unique nationally representative microdata on both U.S. immigrant workers and workers in their 42 home countries. The average price equivalent o…
The new economic case for migration restrictions: An assessment
Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action
Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but kids don’t learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book ad…
The State, Socialisation, and Private Schooling: When Will Governments Support Alternative Producers
Understanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organisations around the world. Economists appear to have a good case for support to non-governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling. However, unlike other policy domains, freer international trade or privatisation, economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of th…
Slow down, you’re going too fast: Matching curricula to student skill levels
How Business is Done in the Developing World: Deals versus Rules
What happens in the developing world when stringent regulations characterizing the investment climate meet weak government willingness or capability to enforce those regulations? How is business actually done? The Doing Business project surveys experts concerning the legally required time and costs of regulatory compliance for various aspects of private enterprise-starting a firm, dealing with construction permits, trading across borders, paying …
Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte, Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics
Escaping Capability Traps Through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
The World Bank and public sector management: What next
The new World Bank strategy on Public Sector Management (PSM) has to be judged against the magnitude of the problems it faces. Two of these are what to do about failed and failing states and what to do about the stagnation of progress in ‘flailing’ states. On both of these fronts the gap between what the world of action wants – an implementable action plan to tackle tough problems like Afghanistan – and what the PSM strategy does (and quite proba…
Why Demographic Suicide? The Puzzles of European Fertility
Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation
In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task: countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even a moderate capability country like India, and millennia to reach the capability of Singapore. Short-term programmatic efforts to build administrative cap…
Looking Like a State: Techniques of Persistent Failure in State Capability for Implementation
In many nations today the state has little capability to carry out even basic functions like security, policing, regulation or core service delivery. Enhancing this capability, especially in fragile states, is a long-term task: countries like Haiti or Liberia will take many decades to reach even a moderate capability country like India, and millennia to reach the capability of Singapore. Short-term programmatic efforts to build administrative cap…
Charles Kenny; Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding-And How We Can Improve the World Even More
Remarks–Part II
there is no abstract
The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the US Border
This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent method…
The impact of public spending on health: Does Money Matter
Solutions When the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development
Desired Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies
Ninety percent of the differences across countries in total fertility rates are accounted for solely by differences in women's reported desired fertility. Using desired fertility constructed from both retrospective and prospective questions, together with instrumental variables estimation, it is shown this strong result is not affected by either ex-post rationalization of births nor the dependence of desired fertility on contraceptive access or c…
The Effect of Household Wealth on Educational Attainment: Evidence from 35 Countries
The authors use household survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 44 surveys (in 35 countries) to document different patterns in the enrollment and attainment of children from rich and poor households. They overcome the lack of income or expenditure data in the DHS by constructing a proxy for long-run wealth of the household from the asset information in the surveys, using the statistical technique of principal components. …
Estimating wealth effects without expenditure data—or tears: An application to educational enrollments in states of India
Using data from India, we estimate the relationship between household wealth and children’s school enrollment. We proxy wealth by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights. In Indian data this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results. State-level results correspond well to independent data on per capita output and poverty. To validate …
Cents and Sociability: Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania
The authors construct a measure of"social capital"in rural Tanzania, using data from the Tanzania Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS), a large-scale survey that asked individuals about the extent and characteristics of their associational activity and their trust in various institutions and individuals. They match this measure of social capital with data on household income in the same villages (both from the SCPS and from an earlier househo…
Divergence, Big Time
Historical data are unnecessary to demonstrate that perhaps the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in per capita income across countries. A plausible lower bound on per capita income can be combined with estimates of its current level in the poorer countries to place an upper bound on long-run income growth. Between 1870 and 1990, the ratio of richest to poorest countries' income increased from roughly 9 to 1 to …
Escaping Capability Traps Through Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
Slow down, you’re going too fast: Matching curricula to student skill levels
Girls’ schooling and women’s literacy: Schooling targets alone won’t reach learning goals
Using the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data on the ability of women at various levels of schooling attainment to read a simple sentence, we show that reaching universal completion of grade six among girls would not bring the world anywhere close to the goal of universal female literacy. These calculations are based on the empirical relationship between grades completed and ability to read, a descriptive ‘learning profile.’ The large litera…
Where Has All the Education Gone
No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers21 Jun 2013Where Has All the Education Gone?Authors/Editors: Lant PritchettLant Pritchetthttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-1581SectionsAboutPDF (2.2 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:March 1996 How to explain the surprising finding that more education did not lead to faster economic growth? Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that …
Measuring outward orientation in LDCs: Can it be done
Income per Natural: Measuring Development for People Rather Than Places
It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We estimate a new statistic: income per natural-the mean annual income of all people born in a given country, regardless of where those people now reside. Income per natural often differs substantially from income per resident, both in its mean and in its distribution. …
Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data-or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India
Deon Filmer, Lant H. Pritchett, Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data-or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India, Demography, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 115-132
The new economic case for migration restrictions: An assessment
How Business is Done in the Developing World: Deals versus Rules
What happens in the developing world when stringent regulations characterizing the investment climate meet weak government willingness or capability to enforce those regulations? How is business actually done? The Doing Business project surveys experts concerning the legally required time and costs of regulatory compliance for various aspects of private enterprise-starting a firm, dealing with construction permits, trading across borders, paying …
Safety Nets or Safety Ropes? Dynamic Benefit Incidence of Two Crisis Programs in Indonesia
A structured model of the dynamics of student learning in developing countries, with applications to policy
Learning trajectories vary amazingly widely across countries, regions, and individual students in dynamic ways. In this paper we develop a parametrized structural model of the dynamics of the learning process and use the model for suggestive policy applications. We first synthesize the existing empirical literature on learning profiles, which suggest a clear set of parameters that formally characterize the learning process. We then calibrate this…
Effective investment in women's futures: Schooling with learning
Women's schooling has long been regarded as one of the best investments in development. Yet countries vary widely in the extent to which a year of schooling conveys useful skills and knowledge and hence schooling and education cannot be treated as synonyms. Using two different cross-nationally comparable data sets which contain measures of schooling, assessments of literacy, and life outcomes for more than 50 countries we show the association of …
The Impact of Population Policies: Reply
Specific critiques were made by James Knowles John Akin David Guilkey and John Bongaarts of the authors article Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies. In response the author makes 6 points: 1) Empirically nearly all the differences across countries in actual fertility are explained by cross-country differences in womens desired fertility. Desired fertility plus a constant is an excellent prediction of actual fertility. 2) The 2 most pot…
Learning equity requires more than equality: Learning goals and achievement gaps between the rich and the poor in five developing countries⋆
Whereas the MDG was a simple schooling goal the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a number of targets for learning. Target 4.1 specifies not just that all children complete primary and secondary school but that this schooling leads to "relevant and effective learning outcomes" and Indicator 4.1.1 tracks progress goal using the proportion of children reaching "minimum proficiency" at early (grade 2/3), intermediate (primary complete) and l…
The World Bank and public sector management: What next
The new World Bank strategy on Public Sector Management (PSM) has to be judged against the magnitude of the problems it faces. Two of these are what to do about failed and failing states and what to do about the stagnation of progress in ‘flailing’ states. On both of these fronts the gap between what the world of action wants – an implementable action plan to tackle tough problems like Afghanistan – and what the PSM strategy does (and quite proba…
Investing in Human Capital in Africa: A framework for research
This essay argues that the existing paradigm in discussions of the acquisition of human capital has been focused on the drive to universal schooling and expanding access and grade attainment. This focus has been quite successful. The expansion of schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the last decades has been impressively rapid, in percentage growth terms much faster than other regions of the world, because SSA at political independence bega…
Aiming higher: Learning profiles and gender equality in 10 low- and middle-income countries
Global education goals have many aims, among them universal basic schooling, universal literacy and numeracy, and gender equality. We use unique, nationally representative data on adult learning outcomes to examine the link between schooling and literacy in ten low- and middle-income countries. We simulate scenarios of increasing school grade attainment, increasing learning per year, and achieving gender equality, and examine learning outcomes in…
Why Demographic Suicide? The Puzzles of European Fertility
Good policy or good luck?
The Impact of Population Policies: Reply
Specific critiques were made by James Knowles John Akin David Guilkey and John Bongaarts of the authors article Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies. In response the author makes 6 points: 1) Empirically nearly all the differences across countries in actual fertility are explained by cross-country differences in womens desired fertility. Desired fertility plus a constant is an excellent prediction of actual fertility. 2) The 2 most pot…
Desired Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies
Ninety percent of the differences across countries in total fertility rates are accounted for solely by differences in women's reported desired fertility. Using desired fertility constructed from both retrospective and prospective questions, together with instrumental variables estimation, it is shown this strong result is not affected by either ex-post rationalization of births nor the dependence of desired fertility on contraceptive access or c…
Does Participation Improve Performance? Establishing Causality with Subjective Data
Data from 121 diverse rural water projects provide strong statistical findings that increasing beneficiary participation directly causes better project outcomes. Three possible econometric objections to these findings are addressed and answered. The subjective nature of the data does not preclude valid, cardinal measures of participation appropriate for statistical analysis. “Halo effects”—changes in the measurement of one variable because of the…
Wealthier is Healthier
We estimate the effect of income on health using cross-country, time-series data on health (infant and child mortality and life expectancy) and income per capita. We use instrumental variables estimates using exogenous determinants of income growth to identify the pure income effect on health, isolated from reverse causation or incidental association. The long-run income elasticity of infant and child mortality in developing countries lies betwee…
Measuring outward orientation in LDCs: Can it be done
Civil Liberties, Democracy, and the Performance of Government Projects
This article uses a cross-national data set on the performance of government investment projects financed by the World Bank to examine the link between government efficacy and governance. It demonstrates a strong empirical link between civil liberties and the performance of government of projects. Even after controlling for other determinants of performance, countries with the strongest civil liberties have projects with an economic rate of retur…
Divergence, Big Time
Historical data are unnecessary to demonstrate that perhaps the basic fact of modern economic history is massive absolute divergence in per capita income across countries. A plausible lower bound on per capita income can be combined with estimates of its current level in the poorer countries to place an upper bound on long-run income growth. Between 1870 and 1990, the ratio of richest to poorest countries' income increased from roughly 9 to 1 to …
A National Snapshot of the Social Impact of Indonesia's Crisis
economic crisis, crisis impact, social impact
Where Has All the Education Gone
No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers21 Jun 2013Where Has All the Education Gone?Authors/Editors: Lant PritchettLant Pritchetthttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-1581SectionsAboutPDF (2.2 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:March 1996 How to explain the surprising finding that more education did not lead to faster economic growth? Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that …
The impact of public spending on health: Does Money Matter
Cents and Sociability: Household Income and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania
The authors construct a measure of"social capital"in rural Tanzania, using data from the Tanzania Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS), a large-scale survey that asked individuals about the extent and characteristics of their associational activity and their trust in various institutions and individuals. They match this measure of social capital with data on household income in the same villages (both from the SCPS and from an earlier househo…
The Effect of Household Wealth on Educational Attainment: Evidence from 35 Countries
The authors use household survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 44 surveys (in 35 countries) to document different patterns in the enrollment and attainment of children from rich and poor households. They overcome the lack of income or expenditure data in the DHS by constructing a proxy for long-run wealth of the household from the asset information in the surveys, using the statistical technique of principal components. …
Understanding Patterns of Economic Growth: Searching for Hills among Plateaus, Mountains, and Plains
The historical path of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the United States is, except for the interlude of the Great Depression, well characterized by reasonably stable exponential trend growth with modest cyclical deviations: graphically, it is a modestly sloping, slightly bumpy hill. However, almost nothing that is true of U.S. GDP per capita (or that of other countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is …
Measurements of Poverty in Indonesia, 1996, 1999, and Beyond
Indonesia's economic crisis has caused a consumption expenditures deterioration in the welfare of Indonesians. Focusing on only one dimension of individual, and family welfare - consumption expenditures - the authors analyze two issues associated with the measurement of poverty. The first issue is how to produce regionally consistent poverty lines - that is, how to define a level of spending for each region that produces the same material standar…
Where Has All the Education Gone?
Cross‐national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker. This implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large, strongly statistically significant, and negative. These are “on average” results, derived from imposing a constant coefficient. Howev…
Estimating wealth effects without expenditure data—or tears: An application to educational enrollments in states of India
Using data from India, we estimate the relationship between household wealth and children’s school enrollment. We proxy wealth by constructing a linear index from asset ownership indicators, using principal-components analysis to derive weights. In Indian data this index is robust to the assets included, and produces internally coherent results. State-level results correspond well to independent data on per capita output and poverty. To validate …
Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data-or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India
Deon Filmer, Lant H. Pritchett, Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data-or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India, Demography, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 115-132
Is More for the Poor Less for the Poor? The Politics of Means-Tested Targeting
Standard economic analysis suggests that when the budget for redistribution is fixed, income transfers should be targeted to (i.e. means-tested for) those most in need. However, both political scientists and economists long have recognized the possibility that targeting might undermine political support for redistribution. We formalize this recognition, developing a simple economy in which both non-targeted (universally received) and targeted tra…
Chapter 5. A Toy Collection, a Socialist Star, and a Democratic Dud? Growth Theory, Vietnam, and the Philippines
Safety Nets or Safety Ropes? Dynamic Benefit Incidence of Two Crisis Programs in Indonesia
Solutions When the Solution is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development
The Social Foundations of Poor Economic Growth in Resource-Rich Countries
This chapter examines the social foundations of developing economies with different types of natural resource endowments. It argues that the nature of communities, institutions, and state-society relations has a significant impact on economic growth trajectories in general, and the management of shocks in particular. In developing countries, the efficacy of these three dimensions is influenced by export structures. Different types of export struc…
Growth Accelerations
The Place Premium: Wage Differences For Identical Workers Across The US Border
"This paper compares the wages of workers inside the United States to the wages of observably identical workers outside the United States-controlling for country of birth, country of education, years of education, work experience, sex, and rural-urban residence. This is made possible by new and uniquely rich microdata on the wages of over two million individual formal-sector wage-earners in 43 countries. The paper then uses five independent metho…
Economics (40 works) · Political science (24 works) · Economic growth (17 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Income, Poverty, and Inequality (12 works) · Population (12 works)