At the Millennium Summit, the world community pledged to promote gender equality and chose as a specific target the achievement of gender equity in primary and secondary education by the year 2005 in every country of the world. Based on the findings from a growing empirical literature that...

Amartya Sen started an important debate about the magnitude of the female survival disadvantage in parts of the developing world by defining the term "missing women" and estimating its number. In this paper we provide an update on the number of missing women based on most recent demographic...

More than 10 years ago, Amartya Sen estimated than some 100 million women are 'missing' as a result of excess female mortality in parts of the developing world, most notably South Asia, China, West Asia, and parts of North Africa (Sen, 1989; Sen 1990). Coale (1991) and Klasen (1994) used more...

At the Millennium Summit, the world community pledged to promote gender equality and chose as a specific target the achievement of gender equity in primary and secondary education by the year 2005 in every country of the world. Based on the findings from a growing empirical literature that...

Gender relations are a key institution governing important aspects of production and reproduction of societies. They are guided by formal institutions as well as informal norms and values. As this survey shows, there is great regional heterogeneity in gender inequality in formal and informal...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data, we argue that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility, and lower investment in physical and human capital....

Observed international investment positions and cross-country heterogeneity in rates of return to capital are hard to reconcile with frictionless capital markets. In this paper, we develop a theory of international capital allocation: a multi-country dynamic spatial general equilibrium model in...

In this paper we construct the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) using variables of the OECD Gender, Institutions and Development database. Instead of measuring gender inequalities in education, health, economic or political participation, the SIGI allows a new perspective on gender...

In 2005 and 2006, the Human Development Report Office undertook a review of UNDP's gender-related indicators, particularly the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). Background papers as well as the results of the process were published in 2006 (e.g....