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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Using international data starting 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points when their per capita incomes...

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...

A surprisingly large number of countries have been able to finance a significant fraction of domestic investment using foreign finance for extended periods. While many of these episodes are in low-income countries where official finance is more important than private finance, we also identify a...