One example includes health, nutrition, and early childhood interventions that seek to affect the role of early environments in shaping long‐term inequalities. In developing countries, policies targeted at promoting survival, nutrition, and early stimulation during the first years of life have the highest potential returns on long‐term outcomes. Providing access to antenatal care and ensuring that births are managed by skilled professionals reduce the odds of maternal and child mortality (Campbell et al., 2006). While most successful interventions start before the age of two, investment during the critical prenatal period has significant long‐term consequences on outcomes: cohorts who were affected by large extreme shocks when in the womb, such as famines, influenzas, and droughts, have long‐term consequences on schooling, income, and health problems (Almond and Currie, 2011). Even less extreme events during pregnancy, such as exposure to stress and pollution or lack of key micronutrients, can have sizable long‐term negative consequences.

Beyond birth and survival, the socioeconomic gaps in child outcomes reflect important differences in the quality of early environments. Supporting parents and early mentors such as preschool teachers can promote skill development, attenuate the negative impact of economic adversities, bridge early gaps, and lay the foundations for improvements of long‐term outcomes in terms of reduced crime, greater education and earnings, and improved adult health (Heckman et al., 2010, Campbell et al., 2014, Gertler et al., 2014).

However, given the technology of skills formation, early investments need to be reinforced by subsequent investments in high‐quality education during primary and secondary schooling. Attending better schools boosts academic performance (and eventually earnings), especially among families at the bottom of the income distribution. Research on measuring the impact of teachers on long‐term outcomes (in the U.S. and the Americas)<sup>17</sup> suggests that policies aimed at recruiting better teachers or helping them to improve their skills and teaching practices, as well as policies that provide incentives to motivate teachers for better performance, have high payoffs (World Bank, 2018).

Nor is it all about children and cognitive skills. The fact that non‐cognitive skills are malleable up to late adolescence opens the window for interventions targeted at disadvantaged groups and tailored to their needs. Personalized counseling to disadvantaged youth in Chicago and in Liberia translated into improved schooling and reduced violent crime and behavior (Heller et al., 2017; Blattman, Jamison and Sheridan, 2017). Approaches that integrate vocational training for out–of‐school adolescent girls with life‐skills training to foster non‐cognitive skills hold equal promise to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty (Bandiera et al., 2015). The question of whether these adolescent interventions have sustained impacts on the beneficiaries’ wellbeing beyond the short one‐year effect and in other settings is an open and fertile area for future investigation.

# **_4.2. Re‐distribution_**

> 17 Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014) find that students assigned to better teachers in 3rd grade are more likely to attend college and earn higher salaries when adults. The importance of the quality of teachers and classroom practices on children’s learning outcomes has been recently confirmed in Ecuador (Araujo et al, 2016) and Romania (Pop‐Eleches and Urquiola, 2013). See Bruns and Luque (2014) for a comprehensive overview of the evidence in Latin America, and the most recent World Development Report on learning (World Bank, 2018).

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