Paul Glewwe

Paul William Glewwe (born April 4, 1958) is an

One of Glewwe's main research areas concerns the relationship between health and education. For example, he (with Hanan Jacoby) finds early childhood malnutrition - and not borrowing constraints or the rationing of school places - to be the likely cause of delayed enrollment in primary school in Ghana,^[8] and documents (with Jacoby and Elizabeth M. King) how malnutrition among young children in the Philippines impairs their academic achievements by delaying the age at which they enroll into school and causing them to learn more slowly, though not by decreasing their effort exerted at school (in terms of attendance, homework, etc.).^[9] Looking into the link between child health and maternal education, Glewwe argues based on evidence from Morocco that mothers' health knowledge, which is generally correlated with (though not necessarily caused by) their schooling, is probably the main pathway how maternal education achieves its strongly positive impact on child health and nutrition in developing countries, which consequently suggests large public health payoffs to female health education in school.^[10]

Impact of the quality of the supply of education on learning

Since the early 2000s, Glewwe has used

• That many pre-1990s estimates of rates of returns to schooling are significantly biased because they fail to account for differences in ability and school quality and, even if accurate, may provide poor guidance to education policy compared to rates of return to investments in school quality;^[15]
• That the vulnerability of households in Peru to welfare decreases during macroeconomic shocks decreases in education and access to foreign transfer networks, increases if households are headed by women or have more children, and is hardly mitigated by Peru's social security programme (with Gillette Hall);^[16]
• That the willingness to pay for schooling in households in rural Peru is high enough at all income levels to cover the operating costs of new schools in their villages, thus suggesting that increasing school fees to raise revenue for educational improvements in developing countries may be feasible (with Paul Gertler).^[17]

Views on priorities for education policy in developing countries

Finally, taking stock of the literature on the supply of education in developing countries, Glewwe (with Michael Kremer) criticizes that, although school enrollment rates have risen rapidly in the developing world between 1960 and 2000, dropout rates remain high and learning outcomes disappointing, and thus argues that the primary policy question should be which policies most effectively improve learning, with RCTs as the preferred tool to conduct that investigation.^[18] More recently, Glewwe has emphasized (with Karthik Muralidharan) that educational spending in developing countries could be much more cost effective, as improvements to pedagogy (e.g. remedial classes for children lagging behind) as well as improvements to school governance and teacher accountability tend to be much more cost effective than mere (yet widespread) increases in "standard" school inputs (e.g. more books); by contrast, interventions aimed at increasing the demand for education by raising students' returns to (or decreasing households' costs of) school enrollment and effort are also generally effective in improving learning outcomes, but vary widely in terms of cost effectiveness.^[19]

Selected publications

• Glewwe, P., Park, A., Zhao, M. (2016) A better vision for development: Eyeglasses and academic performance in rural primary schools in China. Journal of Development Economics, 122(1), pp. 170-182.
• Wydick, B., Glewwe, P., Rutledge, L. (2013) Does International Child Sponsorship Work? A Six-Country Study of Impacts on Adult Life Outcomes. Journal of Political Economy, 121(2), pp. 393-436.
• Glewwe, P. (2013). Education Policy in Developing Countries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
• Glewwe, P. (2008). Education in developing countries. In: Durlauf, S.N., Blume, L.E. (eds.). The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2nd ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Agarwal, N., Glewwe, P., Dollar, D. (2004). Economic Growth, Poverty, and Household Welfare in Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.
• Glewwe, P. (2002). Schools and Skills in Developing Countries: Education Policies and Socioeconomic Outcomes. Journal of Economic Literature, 40(2), pp. 436-482.
• Glewwe, P., Grosh, M. (2000). Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from 15 Years of the Living Standards Development Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Glewwe, P. (1999). The Economics of School Quality Investments in Developing Countries: An Empirical Study of Ghana. London: MacMillan Press.
• Dollar, D., Glewwe, P., Litvack, J. (1998). Household Welfare and Vietnam's Transition to a Market Economy. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

References