COVID-19-related school closures are pushing countries off track from achieving their learning goals. This paper builds on the concept of learning poverty and draws on axiomatic properties from social choice literature to propose and motivate a distribution-sensitive measures of learning poverty. Numerical, empirical, and practical reasons for the relevance and usefulness of these complementary inequality sensitive aggregations for simulating the effects of COVID-19 are presented. In a post-COVID-19 scenario of no remediation and low mitigation effectiveness for the effects of school closures, the simulations show that learning poverty increases from 53 to 63 percent. Most of this increase seems to occur in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries, especially in East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America, and South Asia. The countries that had the highest levels of learning poverty before COVID-19 (predominantly in Africa and the low-income country group) might have the smallest absolute and relative increases in learning poverty, reflecting how great the learning crisis was in those countries before the pandemic. Measures of learning poverty and learning deprivation sensitive to changes in distribution, such as gap and severity measures, show differences in learning loss regional rankings. Africa stands to lose the most. Countries with higher inequality among the learning poor, as captured by the proposed learning poverty severity measure, would need far greater adaptability to respond to broader differences in student needs.
Details
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Author
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Document Date
2020/10/21
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Document Type
Policy Research Working Paper
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Report Number
WPS9446
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Volume No
1
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Total Volume(s)
1
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Country
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Region
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Disclosure Date
2020/10/21
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Disclosure Status
Disclosed
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Doc Name
Learning Poverty : Measures and Simulations
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Keywords
primary-school-age child; Progress in International Reading Literacy Study; Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium; class of poverty measure; Primary and Secondary Education; education management information system; poverty does; primary school age child; Poverty & Inequality; child in school; regressive transfer; large-scale learning assessments; growth and development; annual public expenditure; labor market participation; children attending schools; transfer of income; ministries of education; measure of use; quality of learning; children must; income generating opportunity; lifelong learning opportunity; average test score; changes in distribution; quality of growth; share of children; effective learning outcome; internationally comparable indicator; good quality education; poverty headcount rate; poverty gap ratio; adult literacy survey; educational system
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Citation
Azevedo,Joao Pedro Wagner De
Learning Poverty : Measures and Simulations (English). Policy Research working paper,no. WPS 9446,COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/232501603286799234/Learning-Poverty-Measures-and-Simulations