Michelle Riboud

South Asia is the fastest-growing region in the world today. For the region to maintain this eminence in the global economy, it will need to continue attracting capital and exporting goods and services. Each depends increasingly upon sophisticated human capital inputs—and while the region has made considerable gains in expanding access to educational opportunities at all levels, it still has some distance to go to meet its development objectives. Realizing the Promise: Education for All in South Africa is a companion piece to the World Development Report 2018 and examines the record of South Asian countries in the areas of early childhood education, schooling, teaching, skills, and higher education. It provides the most recent data and analyses on these topics as well as operational lessons.

Sri Lanka has enjoyed high school enrollment rates for several decades. Nevertheless, it still faces major challenges in the education sector. This report comprehensively reviews the performance of Sri Lanka?s education sector, analyzes the most critical constraints, and identifies strategic priorities and policy options to address them.

For the past decade, most South Asian countries have directed their efforts towards achieving universal access to elementary education. While these investments have led to more children being retained in school, they have not translated into better learning outcomes. This report comprehensively analyses the performance of South Asian educational systems in terms of student learning. It attempts to answer three questions:How well do education systems in South Asia perform? What determines student learning outcomes? What policy options are effective in improving learning outcomes, especially given increasing demand and competition for public resources? Because learning outcomes and skill acquisition in the region are low in both absolute and relative terms, schooling does not translate, as it should, into better life chances, including escape from poverty for many more. Nor does schooling contribute to higher productivity and economic growth, so that countries in the region find it difficult to accelerate economic and social development. Governments in the region now fully realize that they need to direct their attention toward improving quality so that students can aspire to fuller lives as both individuals and labour market participants. Merely spending time in school is not enough; students need to register a significant gain in both noncognitive and cognitive skills if countries in the region are to reap full returns on their investments and generate gains in employment, job creation, and productivity. To examine what policies hold promise for improving student learning, the report reviews evidence from large-scale national learning assessments and findings from impact evaluations being conducted in the region. It identifies the following strategic priorities for improving learning outcomes in South Asia: (1) Make learning outcomes the central goal of education policy; (2) Invest in early childhood nutrition; (3) Improve teacher effectiveness and accountability; (4) Provide additional support to disadvantaged children in early grades; (5) Use financing effectively; (6) Leverage the contribution of the non-state sector; and (7) Build learning assessment systems. Each of these policy options will need to be integrated within a larger agenda of inclusive economic growth and governance reform to be truly effective.

Whether or not labour market rigidities are an important contributor to persistently high levels of unemployment remains at the centre of an important debate in Europe. European labour markets are often viewed as rigid and inflexible in opposition to those in North America where legislation is less protective and fosters more mobility. This paper shows that the labour market policies adopted by Central and Eastern European countries, aspiring to join the European Union, do not appear excessively rigid. However, significant and wide-ranging economic reform programs make it difficult to assess the impact of labour market institutions.