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Many development programs that aim to alleviate poverty and improve investments in human capital consider womens empowerment a key pathway by which to achieve impact and often target women as their main beneficiaries. Despite this, womens empowerment dimensions are often not rigorously measured and are at times merely assumed. This paper starts by reflecting on the concept and measurement of womens empowerment and then reviews some of the structural interventions that aim to influence underlying gender norms in society and eradicate gender discrimination. It then proceeds to review the evidence of the impact of three types of interventionscash transfer programs, agricultural interven...
Womens low status and persistent gender gaps in health and education in South Asia contribute to chronic child malnutrition (Smith et al. 2003) and food insecurity (von Grebmer et al. 2009), even as other determinants of food security, such as per capita incomes, have improved. This is particularly relevant for Bangladesh, where chronic food insecurity continues to be an important issue despite steady advances in food production. To be able to leverage agriculture as an engine of inclusive growth, there is a need to develop indicators for measuring womens empowerment, examine its relationship to various food-security outcomes, and monitor the impact of interventions to empower women. Usi...
Knowledge of actual poverty prevalence is important for any society concerned with improving public welfare and reducing poverty. In this paper, we calculate and compare the poverty incidence rate in China using four nationally representative surveys: the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) of 2010, the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) of 2010, the Chinese Household Finance Survey (CHFS) of 2011, and the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) of 2007. Using both international and official domestic poverty standards, we show that poverty prevalence at the national, rural, and urban levels based on the CFPS, CGSS, and the CHFS are much higher than the official estimation and those based on the CHIP. The study highlights the importance of using independent datasets to validate official statistics of public and policy concern in contemporary China.
How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic elites in China and India have been pondering them for centuries and continue to do so today, with enormously high stakes. In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered over a dozen experts from a range of intellectual perspectives--political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics--to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue ...
99 entries written by leading China scholars. Topics include: The China Model, Future Prospects, Global Economy, Trade, Macroeconomics and Finance, Urbanization, Industry and Markets, Agriculture, Land, Infrastructure and Environment, Labour, Wellbeing and Inequality, Health and Education, Gender, Regional Divergence, and Provincial studies.
The persistence of undernutrition in the face of Indias impressive economic growth is of enormous concern. Less than 55 percent of mothers and children receive any essential health and nutrition inputs that are critical for improving maternal and child nutrition. We conducted a desk review (1) to document the extent to which national and civil society/NGO programs in India reflect current technical recommendations for nutrition and (2) assess the operational evidence base for implementing essential interventions for nutrition in the Indian context. We reviewed the design of the two major national programs, Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the National Rural Health Mission (...
This book provides first-hand, insiders’ perspectives on urban issues in China, aiming to provide a theoretically informed and empirically rich discussion of the new social landscape of urban China in the 21st century. The research reported encompasses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, with the latter based on extensive and in-depth fieldwork. The authors, most of them being native Chinese, had distinctive advantages in gaining access to study subjects, and had intimate knowledge of the locations and people they studied. The book’s primary geographical focus is on southern China, especially Guangdong province. This region is in the forefront of China’s transition to a ma...
security effects (investment effects) and through more efficient input use due to enhanced tradability of the land (factor intensity effect), empirical studies on the size and magnitude of these effects are very scarce. Taking advantage of a unique quasi-experimental survey design, this study analyzes the productivity impacts of the Ethiopian land certification program by identifying how the investment effects (technological gains) would measure up against the benefits from any improvements in input use intensity (technical efficiency). For this purpose, we adopted a data envelopment analysisbased Malmquist-type productivity index to decompose productivity differences into (1) within-group...
Researchers and policymakers are paying increasing attention to the nexus of hunger, malnutrition, and public health, and to the related measurement of food and nutrition security. However, focusing on proxy indicators, such as food availability, and on selected head count figures, such as stunting rates, gives an incomplete picture. In contrast, global burden of disease (GBD) studies are outcome based, they follow an established methodology, and their results can be used to derive and monitor the burden of chronic and hidden hunger (undernutrition) at the global level. Judging by this measure, the international goal of halving global hunger between 1990 and 2015 has already been achievedw...