Afrika südlich der Sahara
Refine
Document Type
- Working Paper (3)
- Diploma Thesis (1)
Language
- English (4)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (4)
Keywords
- Kenya (1)
- education (1)
- randomized control trials (1)
Institute
- Wirtschaftswissenschaften (4) (remove)
Existing studies from the United States, Latin America, and Asia provide scant evidence that private schools dramatically improve academic performance relative to public schools. Using data from Kenya—a poor country with weak public institutions—we find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation. This finding is robust to endogenous sorting of more able pupils into private schools. The magnitude of the effect dwarfs the impact of any rigorously tested intervention to raise performance within public schools. Furthermore, nearly twothirds of private schools operate at lower cost than the median government school.
A large empirical literature has shown that user fees signicantly deter public service utilization in developing #countries. While most of these results reflect partial equilibrium analysis, we find that the nationwide abolition of public school fees in Kenya in 2003 led to no increase in net public enrollment rates, but rather a dramatic shift toward private schooling. Results suggest this divergence between partial- and general-equilibrium effects is partially explained by social interactions: the entry of poorer pupils into free education contributed to the exit of their more affluent peers.
The recent wave of randomized trials in development economics has provoked criticisms regarding external validity. We investigate two concerns—heterogeneity across beneficiaries and implementers—in a randomized trial of contract teachers in Kenyan schools. The intervention, previously shown to raise test scores in NGO- led trials in Western Kenya and parts of India, was replicated across all Kenyan provinces by an NGO and the government. Strong effects of shortterm contracts produced in controlled experimental settings are lost in weak public institutions: NGO implementation produces a positive effect on test scores across diverse contexts, while government implementation yields zero effect. The data suggests that the stark contrast in success between the government and NGO arm can be traced back to implementation constraints and political economy forces put in motion as the program went to scale.
A study on the impact of mobile telecommunication on the welfare of sub saharan african countries
(2010)
Africa: A continent is waking up. Not through aid or wealth from the exploitation of natural resources, but through a technological revolution. The access to affordable mobile telecommunication. Inspired by deregulation and pioneered by local champions who have taken a lead in what is today's fastest growing mobile market in the world. There is money to be made in these markets, attracting more and more operators from the northern hemisphere.
However positive the short term impact of this revolution may be, governments should try hard to assure a market of continued competition among network operators, as this competition is the source of a self propelled creation of welfare and new opportunities, motivated from within Africa.
Chapter 1 of this thesis highlights the positive impact of mobile telecommunication on the social and economic life in Sub Saharan Africa. Chapter 2 builds on the static as well as the dynamic version of the Network Pricing Game, a model developed by Dr. Carolyn Gideon, to stress the immanent threat of network markets turning into a monopoly. This theses ends in Chapter 3 with an brief outlook on further drivers of economic growth and opportunities awaiting Sub Saharan Africa in the coming decade.