Economics of School Quality Investments in Developing Countries

This book presents a method to estimate the economic returns to investments in school quality. While economists have long had methods to estimate rates of return to additional years of schooling, until now there has been no method for analyzing returns to investments in school quality. This is regrettable, because many, if not most, government education policies focus on school quality. Empirical work using data from Ghana shows that investments in school quality have higher rates of return than investments in increased years in schooling. The bulk of the study is written by Paul Glewwe, with some coauthored and contributed pieces from his co-researchers Jaikishan Desai, Dean Jolliffe, Raylynn Oliver and Wim Vijverberg, who worked as research assistants on this project.