The Costs of Missing the Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equity

By Dina N. Abu-Ghaida, Stephan Klasen. Social Science Research Network, 2004

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 suggests that gender equity in education promotes economic growth and reduce fertility, child mortality, and undernutrition, we estimate what the costs in terms of growth, and forgone fertility, mortality and undernutrition reduction, will be for the 45 countries that are, on current projections, unlikely to meet the target. Our estimates suggest that, by 2005, the countries that are off track are likely to suffer 0.1-0.3 percentage points lower per capita growth rates as a result and will have 0.1-0.4 more children per woman, and, by 2015, an average of 15 per 1000 higher rates of under five mortality and 2.5 percentage points higher prevalence of underweight children under five. Sensitivity analyses suggest that the results are quite robust to using different specifications and approaches to estimating these losses.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb87410324e2d632dae5eb72c90aa4040b2460c2

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Gender Inequality in Education and Employment on Economic Growth in Developing Countries: Updates and Extensions (2008, methodology): “Keywords: gender inequality, growth, education, employment, discrimination JEL Codes: J7, J16, O4 1 A version of this paper was written as a background paper for the World Bank Flagship Report “Gender and Development in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Growth slowdowns and the middle-income trap (2013, background): “Gender bias could impact economic growth through higher child mortality, increased fertility rates, and greater malnutrition (Abu-Ghaida and Klasens, 2004). In their study of Indian states, Aiyar and Mody (2011) find that a more equal sex ratio is robustly associated with higher economic growth.”
Are Girls the Fairer Sex in India? Revisiting Intra-Household Allocation of Education Expenditure (2013, methodology): “We allow for 14 age-gender group: males and females aged 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19, 20-24, 25-60 and 61 and above (omitting the fraction of women aged 61 and above in the regression analysis).(1) The θk coefficients capture the effect of household composition on household budgetary allocations.”
Gender equality and food security : women's empowerment as a tool against hunger (2013, background): “Gender equality can make a substantial contribution to a country’s economic growth (Abu-Ghaida and Klasen 2004; World Bank 2012), and it is the single most important determinant of food security.”
Globalisation, Women's Economic Rights and Forced Labour (2007, background): “…women is of course not the only form of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation, but it is an issue with wide-reaching consequences for development, since empowerment of women is widely seen to be an end in itself as well as a means to development (Abu-Ghaida and Klasen, 2004).”
Economic Impacts of Child Marriage: A Review of the Literature (2015, neutral): “Lack of education also makes it more difficult for girls to access information on health and welfare for themselves or their children (Semba et al. 2008; Abu-Ghaida and Klasen 2004).”
Engendering Agricultural Research, Development, and Extension (2012, methodology): “According to the estimates of Abu-Ghaida and Klasen (2004), countries that are not on track to meet MDG3 in terms of gender parity in primary and secondary education will likely lose an average of 0.”
Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is there a Win‐Win? (2013, background): “8 Moreover, as highlighted by Abu-Ghaida and Klasen (2004), this study points to the importance of country-specific effects; in particular, it implies that the impact of schooling and gender inequality in education is likely to differ from country to country.”
Globalization and gender equality in the course of development (2012, methodology): “They use measures of women’s labor rights 4 The causal relationship running from gender equality in education to economic growth is analyzed in Abu-Ghaida and Klasen (2004). These authors estimate that countries which do not meet the Millennium Summit by 2005 goals will suffer a 0.”