Teacher pay in Africa: Evidence from 15 countries.

Pay levels for public sector workers-and especially teachers-are a constant source of controversy. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, protests and strikes suggest that pay is low, while comparisons to average national income per capita suggest that it is high. This study presents data on teacher earnings from 15 African countries.

In Appreciation of Adam: Reflections from Friends and Colleagues.

Some of Adam Wagstsaff's colleagues and research collaborators submitted short reflections about the different ways Adam made a difference through his amazing research output to health equity and health systems as well as a leader and mentor. The Guest Editors of this Special Issue selected a set of six essays related to dimensions of Adam's contributions.The first contribution highlights his role early on in his career, prior to joining the World Bank, in defining and expanding an important field of research on equity in health ("Adam and Equity," by Eddy van Doorslaer and Owen O'Donnell).

Joint roles of parenting and nutritional status for child development: Evidence from rural Cambodia.

Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development. Yet, less work has documented the joint influences of parenting and nutritional status on child development among children in the preschool years living in low-income countries. Using panel data from 2016 to 2017 on the parenting, nutritional status, and early developmental outcomes (executive function, language, early numeracy, and socioemotional problems) of 6,508 Cambodian children ages 3-5 years, our findings demonstrate that inequities in early development associated with family wealth are evident at age 3 and increase among children ages 4 and 5 years.

A Conditional Cash Transfer Program in the Philippines Reduces Severe Stunting.

Background: Pantawid, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in the Philippines, provided grants conditioned on health-related behaviors for children aged 0-5 y and schooling for those aged 10-14 y.

Objective: We investigated whether Pantawid improved anthropometric measurements in children aged 6-36 mo.

Methods: We estimated cross-sectional intention-to-treat effects using a 2011 cluster-randomized trial across 130 villages-65 treated and 65 control-with data collected after 31 mo of implementation.

Assessing asset indices.

The use of asset indices in welfare analysis and poverty targeting is increasing, especially in cases in which data on expenditures are unavailable or hard to collect. We compare alternative approaches to welfare measurement. Our analysis shows that inferences about inequalities in education, health care use, fertility, and child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes, are quite robust to the economic status measure used.

Fever and its treatment among the more and less poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper uses individual and household level data to explore empirically the associations between household wealth and the incidence and treatment of fever, as an indicator of malaria, among children in sub-Saharan Africa. The data used are from Demographic and Health Surveys collected in the 1990s from 22 countries where malaria is prevalent. The results suggest that the incidence of fever and its treatment are related to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.