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Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
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Secondary School Madrasas in Bangladesh : Incidence, Quality, and Implications for ReformThis report presents findings from the first ever comprehensive survey to document the incidence and quality of secondary madrasas in Bangladesh. Analysis also draws upon other publicly available administrative and household level datasets. Currently the authors have very little information on school quality in general due to no national learning assessment system and because schools from different streams are tested under different Boards. Thus it is always important to examine the quality of aided madrasas relative to aided secular schools. The report highlights new challenges: while gender equality in access has been achieved in both schools and madrasas, girls remain systematically disadvantaged in terms of learning outcomes. The female learning penalty remain is particularly pronounced in case of madrasas. Overall, the quality of mathematics and English learning is low in madrasas, but performance of students of mainstream schools is also unsatisfactory average quality remains poor across the range of rural institutions. Overall, this report represents an empirically grounded investigation into the hitherto undocumented changes Bangladesh has witnessed in the secondary madrasa school sector in the past two decades. Based on their analysis, the authors suggest a range of policy initiatives that cover the entire secondary education sector, not just the madarasa education. Given the wealth of data collected on secondary institutions and households during the survey, this report only represents the first of a series of rigorous empirical research and analysis which will be undertaken. It is hoped that the report will provide an impetus towards an evidence-based policy debate on madrasas and other critical issues in the education sector.
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Methodology for Measuring Distortions to Agricultural IncentivesThis paper outlines the methodological
 issues associated with the task of measuring that actual
 delivered direct protection or taxation to individual
 agricultural industries, as well as the direct protection or
 anti-protection to non-agricultural sectors. It begins with
 a guide to what elements in principle could be measured.
 There are two key purposes of the distortion estimates being
 generated by this project are: 1) to provide a long annual
 time series of indicators showing the extent to which price
 incentives faced by farmers and food consumers have been
 distorted directly and indirectly by own-government policies
 in all major developing, transition and high-income
 countries, and hence for the world as a whole; and 2) to
 attribute the price distortion estimates for each farm
 product to specific border or domestic policy measures, so
 they can serve as inputs into various types of partial and
 general equilibrium economic models for estimating the
 effects of those various policies on such things as national
 and international agricultural markets, farm value added,
 income inequality, poverty, and national, regional and
 global welfare.
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A Practical Approach to Pharmaceutical PolicyThis book discusses the wide range of challenges faced by policy makers in the pharmaceutical sector, presents the current know-how in terms of policy measures, and provides specific examples of policy packages that can be used in defined circumstances, even if one assumes a certain degree of political resistance and capacity limits on the side of the implementing agency. This book focuses on developing countries and tries to address the issues faced by both low- and middle-income countries. The book does not cover the vaccines market and its respective policies because too many differences exist between the markets for vaccines and pharmaceuticals to cover both subsectors in one publication of this type. The book ends with an outlook on how things might evolve in the longer term. It assumes that some form of convergence will take place toward "models that work," thus reducing the fragmentation of policies and enhancing regulatory and economic efficiencies over time-one hopes to the benefit of all stakeholders in the sector and, in particular, those who, as patients, currently do not have reliable access to effective and safe medicines.