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 political empowerment, measured by the proportion of...

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 lives, in diverse contexts, and to draw...

Since the 1990s, gender mainstreaming has been a widely accepted strategy for promoting gender equality within governments, multilateral agencies, and development NGOs, although critics continue to question its premises and results. This paper reviews how the development agencies of Australia,...

This paper examines gender inequality and female empowerment in rural Viet Nam. Using an extensive panel dataset on 2,181 households, we examine how the welfare of women living in rural areas has evolved during a period of dramatic rural transformation, 2008 - 14. We find that while the economic...

In developing countries, women's decisions concerning their children's health depend on 'empowerment' concerning decision-making, husband/partner's use of violence, woman's attitude towards this violence, available information, and resources. We derive an empowerment indicator using the 'fuzzy...

Using household data from the latest wave of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, this paper utilizes machine learning techniques to examine the effect of gender wage differences within households on women's empowerment and welfare in Ghana. The structural parameters of the post-double selection...

Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world's largest donors for decades. Looking towards an uncertain future in which...

Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a substantial proportion of total sector financing in...

The principle of inclusive development lies at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular Goal 16, with its focus on inclusive societies backed by inclusive institutions. Yet despite its ubiquity across the SDGs, inclusivity not only remains ill-defined, but is both...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between foreign aid fungibility and aggregate welfare. Using panel data from 35 low-income and lower-middle-income countries, we first check the presence of sectoral aid fungibility in our sample and find evidence for it. We then use econometric methods...