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United Nations And The Challenges Of Promoting Gender Equality
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1.4 Significance / Justification Of Study
Economists have long tried
to understand why some countries are poor and some rich, and why some
develop and grow while others remain stagnant. As research has moved
from Solow’s growth theories to endogenous growth, we are still unable
to explain the huge difference in GDP per capital that exists among
countries. Explanations that developed countries have greater
technological
progress, a higher rate of investment and saving,
better education, skill levels and infrastructure leave unanswered the
question of where these differences come from (see Weil, 2005).
Macroeconomics theories have influenced the World Bank and the IMF
policies over the decades as these institutions attempted to help
developing countries towards economic growth and development. Easterly
(2001) recounts the history of attempted solutions that have repeatedly
turned out to be disappointments, a situation he explains as the result
of a lack of attention to the incentives that people face in their
environments. The literature and its prominent authors are currently
moving towards explaining the growth discrepancy between the poor and
the rich nations with factors like social infrastructure (Hall and
Jones, 1999), values (Guiso et al., 2002), trust (Knack and Keefer,
1997), religion (Barro, 2002;
Dollar and Gatti, 1999) or other
aspects of the culture (Weil, 2005). These new explanations will
increasingly require a better understanding of the roles, status and
behavior of a heretofore largely ignored half of the population – women.
These
new efforts sometimes involve expanding our understanding of what is
meant by the concept of development itself. Most prominently,
Noble-laureate Amartya Sen (1999) argues that increasing GDP by itself
should not be the ultimate goal of efforts to help poor countries.
Rather, what aid should hope to maximize are the freedoms associated
with wealth: freedom to exchange goods and labor, freedom to make
choices and influence one’s life, freedom to live longer, freedom to get
an education. He suggest that restrictions on an individual’s right to
own property, save, borrow, become educated, make labor contracts or to
control the products of one’s own labor would qualify as disincentives
to growth, while freedom to exercise these activities would be
associated with economic growth. Given that roughly half of the
population of any country is female, it is reasonable to postulate that a
society’s failure to provide such freedoms or resources to them would
be reflected in failures at the macroeconomics level as well.
Although
the literature exploring such a relationship between the freedoms
accorded women and development is still small, interest in this area is
growing. Those in grass root development work generally acknowledge the
importance of the status of women in development, believing that these
restrictions on freedoms are directly counterproductive for development.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals, for example, include
gender issues among the top priorities. United Nations Development
Program (UNDP) and the World Bank have also done extensive research on
gender and development.
Generally speaking, however, much of the work
in economics has little theoretical interest in women’s welfare per se.
Standard economic theories such as those in public choice or welfare
economics do not focus on individual characteristics; the individual
actor in welfare economics could equally well be a world citizen, a
country national, a man or a woman. However, empirical work requires
that gender be controlled for, as women’s behavior differs from that of
men to such an extent that a single explanatory model is not applicable.
An example of this will be seen in the empirical growth studies by
Robert Barro.
Those writing in the feminist economics tradition
challenge the general invisibility of gender in economic studies and
urge that it be considered in order to avoid further biased results
(Ferber and Nelson 2003). Emphasizing efficiency at the cost of equity,
economists shy away from interpersonal utility comparisons. Yet, if the
welfare of women is important, we need to identify the separate
constraints on women in order to assess how lifting them affects
economic choice and development.
We need to be aware of cultural
issues such as gender restrictions (on both sexes), and changes in them,
when analyzing the effect of gender-related issues on development.
Blank and Reimers (2003) point out that the standard economic method of
focusing on choices under given tastes and constraints tends to simply
accept the status quo concerning cultural issues as permanent and
unchanging. This raises concern given the large changes in gender roles
over the past hundred years.
Psychology, sociology, and anthropology give insights on how such tastes and desires are formed.
However,
the economists tend to be relatively uninformed on the results of other
social sciences. Some of the newer fields in economics, such as
behavioral economics, take these challenges more seriously. Another
example of rising awareness of the need to consider changing social
norms and culture is a recent book on economic growth by David Weil
(2005), which places considerable emphasis on culture and values.
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