This paper reviews empirical findings from economic analyses of the role of gender equality and women's empowerment in reducing poverty and stimulating growth. Going beyond the large literature documenting the impact of female education on a range of development outcomes, the paper presents...

This study assesses the redistributive impact of fiscal policy –– including expenditures and taxation –– in the Arab Republic of Egypt. Using a broadly applied methodology, a fiscal incidence analysis is conducted using survey and government data for fiscal year 2015. Evidence shows that...

In parts of Asia, South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, result in the excess mortality of girls, and skew child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, 1.8 million girls under the age of five go “missing” because of...

This paper examines the role of industrial and occupational segregation in explaining the gender wage gap and its evolution in Georgia between 2004 and 2015. It first documents the declining trends observed in the gender wage gap in Georgia during this period, commenting on some of the possible...

In Armenia, the proportion of women among employed workers increased from 45 to 48 percent between 2008 and 2015. This evolution was accompanied by a fall in the gender earnings gap; however, the difference in average wages of men and women is still among the largest in comparison with countries...

This note describes a new measure of multidimensional poverty developed for Armenia. In 2013, the National Statistical Service of the Republic of Armenia and the World Bank began work on a national measure of multidimensional poverty to supplement the consumption poverty indicator. This measure,...

Building on recent analyses that find a sizeable overall gender wage gap in Azerbaijan's workforce, this paper uses data on young workers in their early years in the labor market to understand how gender wage gaps evolve over time, if at all. The paper uses a unique database from a survey of...

Worldwide, patterns of violence against women differ markedly from violence against men. For example, women are more likely than men to be sexually assaulted or killed by someone they know. The United Nations has defined violence against women as "gender-based" violence, to acknowledge that such...

The authors present an overview of gender-based violence (GBV) in Latin America, with special emphasis on good practice interventions to prevent GBV or offer services to its survivors or perpetrators. Intimate partner violence and sexual coercion are the most common forms of GBV, and these are...

Unexpected adverse events that affect areas or populations widely (covariate shocks) can have major consequences for the welfare of a society. Although the negative effects on households, especially among the poor, are well established in the economics literature, fewer studies have focused on...