This study examines the skills-differentiated impact of a restrictive female labour migration policy in Sri Lanka using monthly departure data from 2012 to 2018 in a difference-in-difference model. The policy has resulted in decreasing departures...
23 April 2013 Marikki Stocchetti 2015 will mark a moment of truth for the international community as the era of the Millennium Development agenda...
15 January 2013Martin Rama from The World bank discusses the process behind the World Development Report 2013 on jobs, which he directed.He emphasises...
M.G. Quibria In the wake of the worst famine of Bangladesh of the post-World War era Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a microcredit experiment in...
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Carl-Gustav Lindén Bangladesh has made some remarkable strides in development and poverty reduction since independence, despite generally weak...
Malokele Nanivazo Sexual violence crime (SV) in wartime is not a new phenomenon. Mass rapes have occurred in armed conflicts in Rwanda, Kosovo...
Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen The Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, was the venue for the launch on 16 June 2012 of the just...
Gender earnings differentials in urban China by region and their changes during the first decade of economic reform are examined. It is found that the female–male earnings ratio increased during the early stage of reform. The male earnings premium...
The food security scenario in South Asia has witnessed rapid progress over the last few decades, yet nutrition outcomes, especially those related to women and children, have failed to keep pace. This paper contends that the role of women in providing...
This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and to the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a comparison of the earlier concept of the ‘informal sector’ with the new expanded concept of the ‘informal...
This study examines the role of women's intra-household status relative to men in children's food security in Pakistan. Data from the 1991 Pakistan Integrated Household Survey (PIHS) yield a measure of evidence of a positive relation between women's...
This is a brief sketch of the Self Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) three-decade-long journey from the local to global and informal to formal sector in search of finding work and income for now 720,000 women workers. Though SEWA remains a local...
This study attempts to determine the extent to which human potential may be unlocked by government or other formal sector actions that induce voluntary contributions by individuals to the activities of Indonesia’s posyandus or village health posts...
Public policy aimed at building capacity among the extremely poor (support for food and nutrition; health; education and, more recently, financial services), combined with a stable macroeconomic environment, has proved to be successful for poverty...
Although recent developments greatly increased interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. Rwanda’s nation-wide land tenure regularization programme is of great interest...
This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involves a number of conceptual and...
Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, we study the role played by land inheritance, other bequests and parental background as influences on an adult’s economic welfare and economic activities...
Using data from a survey of Bangladeshi households, this paper investigates the link between female status and food security. Employing three different indicators of female status – husband’s and wife’s assets brought at marriage, female share of...
At UNU-WIDER, we undertake our work explicitly within the context of an emergent strategy designed to maximize the impact of our research findings. We...
This issue analyses the impact of globalization on Africa and present an overview of the six Africa case studies.
In this article we provide an introduction to the papers in the special section of this edition of the European Journal of Development Research. We start by framing the challenges posed by female entrepreneurship to the research community, note some...
The ReCom – Research and Communication on Foreign Aid – programme produced 247 original studies. More than 300 researchers from 59 countries came together and provided evidence on what does and could work in development, and what can be transferred...
Divorce and widowhood followed by remarriage are common for women in Africa. A key question is how such discontinuous marital trajectories affect women’s wellbeing. Women’s marital trajectories in Senegal are described and correlated with measures of...
Marriage is the single most important economic transaction and social transition in the lives of young people. Yet little is known about the economics of marriage in much of the developing world. This paper examines the economics of marriage in North...
Researchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies...
World hunger is prevalent yet receives relatively less attention compared to poverty. The MDGs have taken a step to address this with the resolution of halving the number of starving people in the world by 2015. A substantial and sustainable...
Part of Journal Special Issue Economics of climate change impacts on developing countries
Land tenure arrangements in Africa are generally skewed in favour of males. Compared to males, female plot owners face complex sets of constraints and systemic high tenure insecurity which culminate in low yields. In order to obtain better returns...
This paper hypothesizes that adaptation to climate change is influenced by the gender of the decision maker of the household. Using a two-wave household panel survey dataset, choice of adaptation strategies employed by female- and male-headed...
Little investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of...
At our 30th Anniversary Conference we took the chance to interview Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University—we asked him to discuss his recent work...
The paucity of non-agricultural paid employment, and under utilization of female labour in Uganda, and other sub-Saharan African countries, is often seen to be the next major obstacle to further poverty reduction and development in the region...
The objective of this paper is to develop a Model that integrates the biologically determined human need for food energy and the economic activity (most) people Bust engage in to be able to eat. The optimal work effort and the optimal body size of...
International Women’s Day on 8th March 2016 is a time to celebrate. It is also a time for reflection. We must constantly remind ourselves that while...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
This paper explores the nature of collective action and group behaviour through a case study of a highly successful political organization of poorer sex workers in Calcutta. The paper asks: What stimulated the participation of sex workers in their...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid for Gender Equality and Development
The capabilities approach has emphasized that inequalities can be analyzed in various dimensions of human functioning. Indicators of these inequalities can be incorporated into assessments of well-being. The capabilities approach also highlights the...
This paper examines group functioning in the management of common pool resources, such as forests. In recent years community forestry groups have mushroomed in South Asia. But how participative, equitable and efficient are they? Many have done well...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2. Marriage is the single most important contractual arrangement youth in North Africa undertake as they navigate their transition to adulthood. Despite its importance in shaping subsequent...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Part of Book Towards Gender Equity in Development
Part of Book Towards Gender Equity in Development
Tony Addison Finland traditionally celebrates the start of summer on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday), and UNU-WIDER currently basks in warm sunshine. At...
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Tony Addison With this issue, Angle returns refreshed from its Nordic summer break. The sun continues to shine on the Baltic, although it is getting...
Tony Addison With our temperatures now well above zero, we head for the official end of the Finnish winter on 1st May (the ‘Vappu’ holiday). As...
Malokele Nanivazo and Lucy Scott The first gender equality workshop under UNU-WIDER’S ReCom—Research and Communication in Foreign Aid project was held...
This is the second of a two-part article presenting key discussion points from the UNU-WIDER gender equality workshop held 12-13 July 2012, in...
Tony Addison As autumn moves into winter in Helsinki, it is time to bring you the October edition of UNU-WIDER’s newsletter, WIDER Angle. Regular...
States’ governance of gender is not unidirectional. In addition to ‘stagnation’ and ‘progress’, there can be an active reversal of rights already granted to women. Using the case of abortion rights in El Salvador, this paper investigates the...
Gender equality is one of the cross-cutting concerns of the UNU-WIDER work programme 2014-18. In this interview economists Elizabeth Asiedu and Jean...
The paper discusses some of the social and historical factors behind the evolution of contemporary women's organizations in Algeria. The paper states that the women question was never a priority. Yet, since the late 1980s, women became advocates of...
This paper examines the impact of gender based violence against women and girls (GBV), in the environment the children live in, on school attendance, school achievement, as well as boys’ and girls’ dropouts. Based on the sixth phase of the...
Prior to the 1970s, the "problems of women", in the societies where their rights were recognized, were defined and dealt with by various movements and political groups in the context of moderating or eliminating legal and customary forms of...
Whether policy support should be designed differently for women entrepreneurs is a particularly relevant question. To answer this, and to inform the design of policies to provide appropriate support for women entrepreneurs, the article compares male...
The urbanization process is frequently shaped by prevailing constructions of gender. The recognition of this phenomenon is vital both in diagnosis and policy terms. This paper aims at illustrating the importance of gender in three major related...
This contribution studies the provision of fringe benefits using a unique survey of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam. Analysis of the survey reveals that women who own SMEs are more likely than men who own similar firms to provide...
We use a gendered dynamic CGE model to assess the implications of biofuels expansion in a low-income, land-abundant setting. Mozambique is chosen as a representative case. We compare scenarios with different gender employment intensities in producing...
This paper uses two large repeated cross-sections, one for the early 1990s, and one for the late 1990s, to describe growth in school enrolment and completion rates for boys and girls in India, and to explore the extent to which enrolment and...
This paper explores the linkages between gender, local knowledge systems and agrobiodiversity for food security by using the case study of LinKS, a regional FAO project in Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Tanzania over a period of eight years and...
This study attempts to convey an accurate and dynamic account of educational inequality in China during the last decade. The study finds that there is clear evidence of rapid expansion of education, and younger students all over China are benefiting...
Based on analysing World Bank and other donor post-conflict reconstruction (PCR) loans and grants from rights-based, macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives, we conclude that few PCR projects identify or address gender discrimination issues...
This paper investigates the effect of a food subsidy programme in India on child malnutrition by addressing the following linked questions using household survey data that includes information on usage of the public distribution system. First, does...
The paper examines the linkages between gender of household heads, education and household poverty in Nigeria between 1980 and 1996. Data analyzed were obtained from four national consumer expenditure surveys conducted in Nigeria in 1980, 1985, 1992...
Using multinomial logit we analyze factors that influence the choice of mechanization technologies in Nyanza Province. The results show that farmers are aware of the attributes of the mechanization technologies, and that animal traction is the most...
Participatory community programmes are a potentially important tool for social empowerment and economic development. How do participatory programmes that specifically target women affect community trust and cohesion? This question is important since...
Only recently has it been recognized that women may not share in the wealth of men, even within the same household or family. Moreover, there is growing evidence that the gender distribution of wealth matters. This paper first reviews the available...
by Noeleen Heyzer and Martin KhorThe debate on the Asian crisis continues. There are two sets of reasons given to explain why the Asian Miracles...
9 December 2013 Simon Feeny Vulnerability and resilience are very closely related terms. Vulnerability is usually referred to as the likelihood of...
22 August 2013 Tony Addison Angle returns from its Nordic summer break, to bring you more news and results from UNU-WIDER’s programme. Coming up in...
This paper aims to study the impact of migration on labour supply and time-use of women left behind in Kyrgyzstan. Using the household survey data for 2011, labour supply is measured by occupational choices and working hours. Apart from the labour...
29 June 2013 Tony Addison The June-July summer issue of Angle comes to you amid the 19 hours daylight of the Finnish mid-summer. Last week UNU-WIDER’s...
Tony Addison This month saw UNU-WIDER in Stockholm for the ReCom results meeting on ‘aid and the social sectors’, which took place at Sida on 13 March...
31 October 2013 Tony Addison October finds Angle in New York, for our event on ‘Fragility and Aid–What Works?’ at the Permanent Mission of Germany to...
Maria Minniti and Wim Naudé In recent years, the rate of new business formation by women has significantly outpaced the rate of new business formation...
The much heralded growth and transformation of many economies in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade continues to receive prominent attention in academic scholarship and among policy practitioners. An apparent feature about this transformation...
Roger Williamson The Danish State Secretary for Development Policy Charlotte Slente, welcomed the participants and contributors to the meeting and...
25 June 2014 Malokele Nanivazo After a long series of conflicts and apparent macroeconomic mismanagement, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) seems...
24 September 2013 Tony Addison As Helsinki moves into a crisp sunny autumn, Angle brings you news of two big UNU-WIDER events. ‘Egalitarian Principles...
Official development assistance to women’s equality organizations and institutions is effective in increasing women’s political empowerment. In contrast, aid targeting reproductive health and family planning does not appear to impact women’s...
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Assistance for Peacebuilding
Many World Bank investments include women’s concerns only superficially. Lack of attention to gender roles negatively impacts women’s rights. The Bank’s continued promotion of user fees in sexual and reproductive health projects prevents poor women...
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum...
We conduct a lab experiment to assess whether gender of dictators and recipients, and distributional preferences affect allocations in a modified dictator game where both parties perform a cognitive task and the resulting pie to be split is the sum...
This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these...
This paper investigates the role of non-traditional aid in meeting global challenges in improving gender equality and gender-related socioeconomic needs in the twenty-first century. We define non-traditional aid as private donations from individuals...
This paper investigates whether cyclical variation in women’s labour supply in Africa contributes to smoothing household consumption. We find little support for this hypothesis. Using comparable individual data on about 0.5 million women in 30 Sub...
Donors of foreign aid increasingly claim to consider gender inequality in the recipient countries to be a serious concern. While aid specifically to promote gender equality receives only a tiny share of aid budgets, allocations to education, health...
This paper compares the use of Challenge Funds by the UK’s Department for International Development and Sweden’s International Development Agency to address gender challenges in development. Challenges Funds are meant to bring the interests of...
The Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, was critical in making gender equality a development goal and adopted gender-mainstreaming as its primary mechanism to achieve this. Effective implementation of gender-mainstreaming...
Today it is widely acknowledged that increasing the gender sensitivity of development aid increases its effectiveness. This report evaluates the extent to which the World Bank integrates gender concerns into its policies and investments, pointing out...
This article examines the relationship between women’s economic and social empowerment in the context of extreme poverty. It is based on the findings of primary fieldwork on the char islands of north-west Bangladesh, investigating the processes...
The Republic of Haiti is a prime international remittance recipient country in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, relative to its gross domestic product (GDP). The downside of this fact may be that Haiti, based on population size, is also...
Although Denmark shares with the other four Nordic countries certain attributes, such as pragmatic protestant religion, small and homogenous population, strong social democratic parties and ambitious welfare states, it also has its own...
In order to correct for the initial gender blindness of the Paris Declaration and related aid modalities as general and sector budget support, it has been proposed to integrate a gender dimension into budget support entry points. This paper studies...
In this paper, we address the question of whether official development assistance promotes gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa region by examining the effects of aid to Women’s Equality Organizations and Institutions on women’s...
Exploring the impact of social change in the Middle East on women's status and roles, as well as women's varied responses, this book focuses on the gender dynamics of some of the major social processes in the region: economic development and women's...
Identity politics refers to discourses and movements organized around questions of religious, ethnic and national identity. This work focuses on political-cultural movements that are making a bid for state power, for fundamental juridical change, or...
Part of Journal Special Issue Developing Countries in the WTO Regime
Discrimination against women and girls is a pervasive and long-running phenomenon that characterises Indian society at every level. India’s progress...
Exploring the effects of the post-1989 developments in Eastern and Central Europe on the social and economic position of the women of the region, Valentine Moghadam explains how the economic crisis and subsequent development, social breakdown, and...
Women, a majority of the world's population, receive only a small proportion of its opportunities and benefits. According to the 1993 UN Human Development Report, there is no country in the world in which women's quality of life is equal to that of...
This lucid and accessible collection explores gender and national identity within political movements in the Middle East, the Maghreb and South Asia. It reveals how nationalism, revolution and Islamization are gendered processes, and argues that in...
This volume aims at remedying the relative dearth of studies addressing issues of women and development in Arab countries. One major concern of its authors is to improve the statistical information available by including the often omitted aspect of...
Part of Book Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies
Part of Book Group Behaviour and Development
This lucid and accessible collection explores gender and national identity within political movements in the Middle East, the Maghreb and South Asia. It reveals how nationalism, revolution and Islamization are gendered processes, and argues that in...
Part of Book Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure
This volume aims at remedying the relative dearth of studies addressing issues of women and development in Arab countries. One major concern of its authors is to improve the statistical information available by including the often omitted aspect of...
Structural transformation in rural Vietnam has led to rising incomes and a diversification of livelihoods away from agriculture. Using panel data on children in 2,181 rural households surveyed over the 2008-14 period, we examine how the welfare of...
With the aim of reducing women’s greater unpaid care work than men’s and increasing women’s paid employment, this paper examines the extent to which World Bank investments address unpaid care work. The paper conducts an in-depth gender analysis of 36...
Identity politics refers to discourses and movements organized around questions of religious, ethnic and national identity. This work focuses on political-cultural movements that are making a bid for state power, for fundamental juridical change, or...
This position paper on Aid and Gender Equality was prepared by UNU-WIDER under the ReCom programme of Research (Re) and Communication (Com) on foreign aid. It aims to provide a coherent up-to-date overview and guide to a complex issue in the...
Part of Journal Special Issue Globalization-Poverty Channels and Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Globalization-Poverty Channels and Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Inequality and Poverty in China
Corporate actors are now playing an important role in international development and contributing new ideas to development aid. Corporate–donor partnerships represent unique opportunities to combine the experience of donors with the innovative...
Revisiting foundational feminist work on the concept of empowerment from the 1980s and 1990s, this paper draws on the findings of a multi-country research programme, ‘Pathways of Women’s Empowerment’, to explore pathways of positive change in women’s...
In the run up to the announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) in September every development issue is clamouring for attention. The...
Part of Book Reforming Africa's Institutions
Whether cash transfers have unintended behavioural effects on the recipient household’s labour supply is of considerable policy interest. We examine the ‘intent to treat effect’ of the Indira Gandhi National Old-Age Pension Scheme on prime-age women...
We study the labour market dynamics of men and women in El Salvador and Nicaragua, focusing on the factors that help men and women move into an advantageous labour market state from an unfavourable state. We consider ‘advantageous’ states to be...
Since existing injustices and the quest for justice are seen to be the main causes for violent clashes, it is often claimed that the restoration of justice must be the most important goal of post-conflict reconstruction. However, the current policy...
This paper describes and decomposes wage differences between female and male workers. The results indicate that females receive low wages because of unequal pay within sectors, and that the wage gap caused by the difference in sectoral attainment is...
HIV/AIDS has a severe impact on food security, affecting all of its dimensions: availability, stability, access, utilization. FAO recognizes that HIV/AIDS is a determining factor for, as well as a consequence of, food insecurity. Although the...
The study suggests that gender inequality acts as a significant constraint to growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and that removing gender-based barriers to growth will make a substantial contribution to realizing Africa’s economic potential. In particular...
The COVID-19 crisis — the pandemic, restrictions, and recession — has not been a grand leveler. While all of us, rich and poor, faced the fear and...
This paper focuses on gender aspects upon children’s food security. Using data from the 1995/1996 Nepal Living Standards Survey, this study attempts to find evidence to whether children are heavier for their age, taller for their age or heavier for...
This research project traces how women’s participation in the Liberian civil wars, as combatants and peace agents, reconstructs gender relations in the post-civil war context. The current literature examines the role of women in the governance of...
Tanzania has expanded its social protection framework significantly over the past decade, but the country continues to grapple with important gender inequalities. This paper examines, first, the evolution and effects of Tanzania’s social protection...
The paper considers the impact of livelihoods oriented agricultural service provision for smallholder farmers on gender relationships and food security. The paper contents that the democratization and liberalization of agricultural services towards...
Tanzania has undertaken important health sector reforms in the new millennium, and the most recent Health Sector Strategic Plan (2021–26) lays out ambitious targets to achieve universal health coverage. Yet, women in Tanzania continue to face...
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of...
This paper focuses on the determinants of infant and child mortality in Kenya. It specifically examines how infant and child mortality is related to the household’s environmental and socio-economic characteristics, such as mother’s education, source...
This study examines how, why, and under what conditions marginalized women of customary communities can contribute and gain access to the benefits of the social forestry programme. We found that customary communities’ dependence on forest resources...
Using data from the 1995 Malawi Financial Markets and Food Security Survey, this study seeks to discover if women’s relative control over household resources or intra-household bargaining power in rural Malawi, gauged by their access to microcredit...
This paper addresses the economic impact of forest management on gender and food security of rural poor in Africa. The analyses reveal that deforestation places major demands on women and children’s time, limiting their opportunities to obtain an...
This paper uses data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey 2 (2003/2004) to find evidence to whether children are less likely to work and more likely to attend school in a household where the mother has a say in the intra-family decision-making...
Tanzania has experienced relatively strong and stable economic growth accompanied by social stability over the past two decades. The country is also pursuing an ambitious development plan with significant employment objectives. For development to be...
Part of Book The Job Ladder
Africa’s formal economies responded poorly to economic reform measures in the 1980s and 1990s while informal markets and institutions responded dynamically and proved to be more resilient. Using comparative analysis of African informal economies...
Join the network
