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This paper estimates the impact of a large negative childcare shock on gender gaps in entrepreneurship using the shock created by national COVID-19 school closure policies. The paper leverages a unique data set of monthly enterprise data collected from a repeated cross-section of business owners across 50 countries via Facebook throughout 2020 and in 2021. The paper shows that, globally, female-led firms were, on average, 4 percentage points more likely to close their business and experienced larger revenue declines than male-led firms during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (male firms closed at a rate of 17 percent in 2020, and 12 percent in 2021). The gender gap in firm closures persisted into 2021. The closing of schools, a key part of the care infrastructure, led to higher business closures, and women with children were more likely to close their business in response to a school closure policy than men with children. Female entrepreneurs were found to take on a greater share of the increase in the domestic and care work burden than male entrepreneurs. Finally, the paper finds that women entrepreneurs in societies with more conservative norms with respect to gender equality were significantly more likely to close their business and increase the time spent on domestic and care responsibilities in response to a school closure policy, relative to women in more liberal societies. The paper provides global evidence of a motherhood penalty and childcare constraint to help explain gender inequalities in an entrepreneurship context.
COVID-19 (Disease) --- Mothers --- Sex differences. --- Employment.
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What role do institutional constraints and social norms play in determining persistent gender gapsin economic and political participation and have institutional reforms been successful in reducing these gaps? This paper argues that, at the roots of current gender inequalities, there are traditional patriarchal social structures in which power is unequally distributed, with men traditionally holding authority over women. The power imbalance is manifested in governance arrangements, of which the author consider discriminatory formal laws and adverse gender norms that perpetuate gender inequality. The author reviewed the evidence on the effectiveness of reforms addressing gender inequality and applied via formal law changes. Aware of endogeneity issues as reforms may be adopted in countries where attitudes toward women had already been improving, we focus on micro-empirical studies that tackle this challenge. The evidence suggests that some reforms have been successful reducing inequalities. Power and norms can shift and sometimes temporary interventions can deliver long-term results. There are, however, enormous challenges posed by power inequalities and inherent social norms that are slow-moving. Formal laws can remain ineffective or cause a backlash because: i) the law is poorly implemented and/or people are not aware of it; ii) informal systems and social norms/sanctions are stronger; iii) powerful groups (in our case, men) may oppose these changes. Finally, reforms that improve women's economic opportunities can create the conditions to increase political participation and vice-versa, thereby generating a self-reinforcing cycle of inclusion.
Gender --- Gender and Governance --- Gender and Social Policy --- Governance --- Inequality --- National Governance --- Social Development --- Social Inclusion --- Social Inclusion & Institutions --- Social Norms
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This book provides guidance to policy makers seeking to design effective monitoring systems for disaster response management. This volume describes the data needs that arise after natural disasters, assesses current data management reform efforts, and discusses the institutional preconditions and tactical and strategic steps necessary for establishing systems that work. Six country case studies elaborate lessons from the success and failures of efforts to establish innovative monitoring systems in the aftermath of disasters in Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Disaster relief --- Information storage and retrieval systems --- Emergency management --- Natural disasters --- Consequence management (Emergency management) --- Disaster planning --- Disaster preparedness --- Disaster prevention --- Disasters --- Emergencies --- Emergency planning --- Emergency preparedness --- Automatic data storage --- Automatic information retrieval --- Automation in documentation --- Computer-based information systems --- Data processing systems --- Data storage and retrieval systems --- Discovery systems, Information --- Information discovery systems --- Information processing systems --- Information retrieval systems --- Machine data storage and retrieval --- Mechanized information storage and retrieval systems --- Disaster assistance --- Emergency assistance in disasters --- Emergency relief --- Management --- Planning --- Preparedness --- Prevention --- Public safety --- First responders --- Computer systems --- Electronic information resources --- Data libraries --- Digital libraries --- Information organization --- Information retrieval --- Human services --- Data centers
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This publication presents tools and techniques for measuring service delivery in health and education and people's experiences from the field in deploying these methods. It begins by providing an introduction to the different methodological tools available for evaluating the performance of the health and education sectors. Country specific experiences are then explored to highlight lessons on the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of using different techniques to measure quality in a variety of different contexts and of using the resulting data to affect change. This book is a valuable r
Medical care --- Health facilities --- Educational surveys --- Quality assurance --- Quality control --- Measurement. --- School surveys --- Facilities, Health --- Health care facilities --- Health care institutions --- Health institutions --- Institutions, Health --- Medical care facilities --- Medical care institutions --- Medical facilities --- Delivery of health care --- Delivery of medical care --- Health care --- Health care delivery --- Health services --- Healthcare --- Medical and health care industry --- Medical services --- Personal health services --- Social surveys --- Public health
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The ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa has put a huge strain on already weak health systems. Ebola deaths have been disproportionately concentrated among health care workers, exacerbating existing skill shortages in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in a way that will negatively affect the health of the populations even after Ebola has been eliminated. This paper combines data on cumulative health care worker deaths from Ebola, the stock of health care workers and mortality rates pre-Ebola, and coefficients that summarize the relationship between health care workers in a given country and rates of maternal, infant, and under-five mortality. The paper estimates how the loss of health care workers to Ebola will likely affect non-Ebola mortality even after the disease is eliminated. It then estimates the size of the resource gap that needs to be filled to avoid these deaths, and to reach the minimum thresholds of health coverage described in the Millennium Development Goals. Maternal mortality could increase by 38 percent in Guinea, 74 percent in Sierra Leone, and 111 percent in Liberia due to the reduction in health personnel caused by the epidemic. This translates to an additional 4,022 women dying per year across the three most affected countries. To avoid these deaths, 240 doctors, nurses, and midwives would need to be immediately hired across the three countries. This is a small fraction of the 43,565 doctors, nurses, and midwives that would need to be hired to achieve the adequate health coverage implied by the Millennium Development Goals. Substantial investment in health systems is urgently required not only to improve future epidemic preparedness, but also to limit the secondary health effects of the current epidemic owing to the depletion of the health workforce.
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Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest. This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the analysis. First, the program improved land access for legally married women (about 76 percent of married couples) and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights without gender bias. Second, the analysis finds a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures. This effect was particularly pronounced for female headed households, suggesting that this group had suffered from high levels of tenure insecurity, which the program managed to reduce. Third, land market activity declined, allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by vulnerable people. Implications for program design and policy are discussed.
Agricultural investment --- Agriculture --- Banks & Banking Reform --- Common Property Resource Development --- Gender --- Land administration --- Municipal Housing and Land --- Rural Development --- Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction --- Urban Housing --- Rwanda
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Women make essential contributions to agriculture in developing countries, where they constitute approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. However, female farmers typically have lower output per unit of land and are much less likely to be active in commercial farming than their male counterparts. These gender differences in land productivity and participation between male and female farmers are due to gender differences in access to inputs, resources, and services. In this paper, the authors review the evidence on productivity differences and access to resources. They discuss some of the reasons for these differences, such as differences in property rights, education, control over resources (e.g., land), access to inputs and services (e.g., fertilizer, extension, and credit), and social norms. Although women are less active in commercial farming and are largely excluded from contract farming, they often provide the bulk of wage labor in the nontraditional export sector. In general, gender gaps do not appear to fall systematically with growth, and they appear to rise with GDP per capita and with greater access to resources and inputs. Active policies that support women's access and participation, not just greater overall access, are essential if these gaps are to be closed. The gains in terms of greater productivity of land and overall production are likely to be large.
Anthropology --- Chemical fertilizers --- Economic efficiency --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Gender and Development --- Gender and Health --- Gender and Law --- Land acquisition --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Mecanization use --- Rural Development Knowledge & Information Systems --- Yield Differences
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Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocated firms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) a group offered assistance for costless business registration; b) a group offered assistance with costless business registration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a group offered assistance for costless business registration along with an information session at a bank that ended with the offer of business bank accounts. The study finds that all three treatments had extremely large impacts on business registration, with 75 percent of those offered assistance receiving a business registration certificate. The findings offer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize in this dimension. However, in common with other studies, information and assistance has a limited impact on tax registration. The paper measures the short-term impacts of formalization on financial access and usage. Business registration alone has no impact for either men or women on bank account usage, savings, or credit. However, the combination of formalization assistance and the bank information session results in significant impacts on having a business bank account, financial practices, savings, and use of complementary financial products.
Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Gender --- Private Sector Development
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