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This report presents evidence from the Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) surveys across Africa from the past ten years to help identify areas of resilience and constraint in health and education service delivery, shedding light on how these may foster or stunt human capital accumulation.

Many Roma are among the poorest and most vulnerable Europeans, facing poverty, exclusion, and discrimination. In European Union member countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with substantial Roma populations, inequalities between Roma and non-Roma start early and are striking. Some of these inequalities reflect hard-wired family circumstances. For example, a Roma child is much more likely to grow up in a household at the very bottom of the income distribution, or have parents with little or no education. Other inequalities reflect limited opportunities such as access to basic goods and services (e.g., quality education and adequate living conditions), which are necessary not only for realizing ones potential in life, but also for living with dignity. This book focuses on identifying pathways to promote fair chances for disadvantaged Roma in CEE countries. Investing early, by promoting good nutrition, cognitive child development, and access to quality education is a policy with recognized high returns, especially for disadvantaged children.

Jobs are crucial for individual well-being. They provide a livelihood and, equally important, a sense of dignity. They are also crucial for collective well-being and economic growth. However, the rules and incentives that govern labor markets in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have led to in efficient and inequitable outcomes, both individually and collectively. Several underlying distortions prevent a more productive use of human capital and have led to a widespread sense of unfairness and exclusion, of which the Arab Spring was a powerful expression. The Middle East and North Africa has a large reservoir of untapped human resources, with the world's highest unemployment rate among youth and the lowest participation of females in the labor force. Desirable jobs, defined as high paying or formal jobs, are few, and private employment is overwhelmingly of low added value. Overall, the region's labor markets can be characterized as being in efficient, inequitable, and locked in low productivity equilibrium.

Economic growth has been sustained for many years pre-crisis in the region, but this has not resulted in the creation of an adequate number of jobs and has succeeded, at best, in generating low-quality, informal jobs. The report addresses one margin of exclusion: informal employment and the vulnerabilities and lack of opportunities associated with it. The report analyzes the constraints that prevent informal workers from becoming formal and discusses policy options to effectively address these constraints. This report looks at informality through a human development angle and focuses particularly on informal employment. Informality is a complex phenomenon, comprising unpaid workers and workers without social security or health insurance coverage, small or micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and large registered firms that may partially evade corporate taxes and social security contributions. The first section provides a detailed profile of informal workers in the region. The second section describes the characteristics of informality in micro-firms that operate outside the regulatory framework and in larger firms that do not fully comply with social security contribution requirements and tax obligations. The third section presents informality and the firm. The fourth section focuses on informality: choice or exclusion? The fifth section discusses policy options for effectively expanding coverage of health insurance and pension systems and promoting the creation of better quality jobs.

Human capital—the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives—is a central driver of sustainable growth, poverty reduction, and successful societies. More human capital is associated with higher earnings for people, higher income for countries, and stronger cohesion in societies. Much of the hard-won human capital gains in many economies over the past decade is at risk of being eroded by the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. Urgent action is needed to protect these advances, particularly among the poor and vulnerable. Designing the needed interventions, targeting them to achieve the highest effectiveness, and navigating difficult trade-offs make investing in better measurement of human capital now more important than ever. The Human Capital Index (HCI)—launched in 2018 as part of the Human Capital Project—is an international metric that benchmarks the key components of human capital across economies. The HCI is a global effort to accelerate progress toward a world where all children can achieve their full potential. Measuring the human capital that children born today can expect to attain by their 18th birthdays, the HCI highlights how current health and education outcomes shape the productivity of the next generation of workers and underscores the importance of government and societal investments in human capital. The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19 presents the first update of the HCI, using health and education data available as of March 2020. It documents new evidence on trends, examples of successes, and analytical work on the utilization of human capital. The new data—collected before the global onset of COVID-19—can act as a baseline to track its effects on health and education outcomes. The report highlights how better measurement is essential for policy makers to design effective interventions and target support. In the immediate term, investments in better measurement and data use will guide pandemic containment strategies and support for those who are most affected. In the medium term, better curation and use of administrative, survey, and identification data can guide policy choices in an environment of limited fiscal space and competing priorities. In the longer term, the hope is that economies will be able to do more than simply recover lost ground. Ambitious, evidence-driven policy measures in health, education, and social protection can pave the way for today's children to surpass the human capital achievements and quality of life of the generations that preceded them.