This report analyzes potential factors and determinants affecting female labor force participation in Croatia and identifies potential policy options to facilitate greater participation of women in the labor market. Our results show that the main reason for women's inactivity in Croatia is...

Empowering women to engage in productive employment is not only critical to achieving gender equality but also critical for economic growth and poverty reduction. This paper studies the pattern of female activity and gender segmentation in the Indian manufacturing and services sectors. Although...

Disasters in Bangladesh and protests elsewhere have created an intense debate about the value, particularly to women, of apparel employment in developing countries. This paper focuses on how the forces of globalization, specifically the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), have affected women's wages...

Women's economic empowerment is not a new issue; nevertheless, it continues to challenge governments and development assistance agencies. One of the reasons for this hurdle may well be that gender advocates and growth devotees are speaking different languages when there is a huge space for them...

This paper offers for the first time a global picture of gender discrimination by the law as it affects women's economic opportunity and charts the evolution of legal inequalities over five decades. Using the World Bank's newly extended Women, Business and the Law database, the paper documents...

Women have experienced significant changes in various spheres of their lives during the last decades as Bangladesh made economic progress. Yet women's economic engagement and empowerment are subdued, as they cannot make sufficient choices for themselves. This book provides a comprehensive...

The Women Economic Empowerment report outlines the factors contributing to the persistently low economic participation of Egyptian women and to identify "gender smart" policies and solutions to boost economic growth while at the same time, narrowing relevant gender gaps. The study provides the...

This note examines the influence of household decision making on women's uptake of reproductive health services, using data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM). In households where women have greater decision?making power, the note finds a significant and...

Little literature currently exists on the effects of childcare use on maternal labor market outcomes in a developing country context, and recent studies offer mixed results. This paper attempts to fill these gaps by analyzing several of the latest rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standards...