Interdependency in transnational education governance

The dominance of International Organisations in the production of global metrics has not only penetrated the transnational social and policy fields; numbers have become an integral part of the fabric of International Organisations themselves. However, amidst avid critics and unapologetic fans, surprisingly little is known about the ways in which global processes of quantification are reconfiguring the field. Metrics have infiltrated not only organisational cultures and the environments these organisations inhabit; crucially, they are reshaping the ways International Organisations co-exist, compete and survive in an increasingly quantified yet uncertain world. Recent decades have seen fervent activity by International Organisations to build working collaborations and broad alliances for finding ‘global solutions’ to ‘global crises’. Financial investment in these collaborations is increasing and so is hope: If only we had known, we could have acted. Given the moral dimension that these new indices of progress have taken, as well as the enormous human and environmental cost of their failures, there is growing recognition for the need to examine the interplay of International Organisations in producing quantification for transnational governance

Peer effects and textbooks in African primary education

Textbooks could be a cheap and efficient input to primary school education in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effects of textbooks on student outcomes and separate between direct effects and externalities. Using the rich data set provided by the ‘Program on the Analysis of Education Systems’ (PASEC) for five Francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes beyond the estimation of direct effects of textbooks on students' learning and focuses on peer effects resulting from textbooks owned by students' classmates. Using nonparametric estimation methods, we separate the direct effect of textbooks from their peer effect. The latter clearly dominates but depends upon the initial level of textbook availability