World Bank Acknowledges Legal Reforms for Women Over the Last Decade

International economist Augusto Lopez-Claros is the former director of the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group, over the period 2011-2017. As part of this group, Augusto Lopez-Claros—recent author of Equality for Women = Prosperity for All, published by St. Martin’s Press—was responsible for the World Bank’s benchmarking work, including the Doing Business Report and the Women, Business and the Law Report.

The 2019 edition of the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law report examined the effect of reforms made in the last 10 years and whether progress had been made in creating equal economic opportunities for women. The report also looked at whether the legislation introduced or reformed around the world made it easier for women to participate in the global economy. The report is based on a database that has been built at the World Bank over the past decade examining the multiple restrictions and discriminations against women that are embedded in the laws of a large number of countries, which may undermine her property rights, limit her mobility, impose restrictions on access to the job market, discourage entrepreneurship and, in general, turn women into second class citizens with reduced opportunities for economic and political empowerment.

Over the years the report has become an extremely useful compendium of gender discrimination, with a particular focus on its legal underpinnings. The data—which is made public for every country and highlights, for instance, some 23 different forms of discrimination against women in Iran—has not only highlighted the destructive role of legal restrictions on women’s economic agency, but has also provided powerful incentives for countries to pursue legislative reforms, increasingly aware that discrimination against women is not only a violation of women’s rights, but also a particularly misguided public policy, with adverse implications for productivity, competitiveness, and economic growth.

The 2019 report analyzed data from 187 economies over the last decade. Researchers gathered data around eight indicators of women’s interactions with the law throughout their careers. The indicators included starting a job, running a business, getting married, managing assets, getting paid, and getting a pension. For example, the having children indicator analyzed laws on maternity and paternal leave while the starting a job indicator evaluated laws on gender discrimination in employment.

The 2019 average global score across all eight indicators was 74.71 meaning women were given only about three-fourths of all the legal rights given to men. The Middle East and North Africa in particular, lagged behind with an average score of 47.37. However, there has been progress. A decade ago, the average score was 70.06. In that 10-year period, 131 countries implemented 274 legal reforms to increase gender equality. Some of the reforms made concerned laws on sexual harassment at work, paternal leave, and non-discrimination in access to credit.

The top six countries with a perfect score of 100 were Belgium, France, Denmark, Latvia, Sweden, and Luxembourg. The top six reformers were from Sub-Saharan Africa and included Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mauritius, and Malawi.

Ensuring a sustainable development path

 

Prior to going on sabbatical, Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros served as the director of the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group for six years. An expert with extensive experience in economic development, he has written extensively on a range of issues. He has argued that although high economic growth in recent decades has greatly improved average life expectancy, infant mortality, and other leading indicators, policymakers and development practitioners are still worried about the sustainability of these trends and whether people in developing countries would eventually enjoy the high standards of living of high-income countries, against the background of a planet under increasing stress as a result of climate change.

A key finding of the latest scientific work on climate change is that the annual cost of introducing control measures for greenhouse gases is far smaller than the potential cost of uncontrolled climate change. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has, in the past, provided estimates suggesting that stabilizing greenhouse gases by 2030 would slow global economic growth by maybe 0.1-0.2 percentage point per year. The risks of inaction, however, are huge. It has proved difficult for computer models to deliver robust cost estimates for scenarios that lie outside the range of recent human experience.

A rise in temperatures in excess of 2°C with respect to pre-industrial levels, for instance, has not been seen on the planet in the last 1 million years (perhaps much longer), though this is the envisaged increase consistent with the pledges made by 175 countries in Paris in 2015. So, one central element of the solution will be implementing a transition to a low carbon economy that will involve the use of cleaner fuels, including solar-photovoltaic and onshore-wind technologies, which have become increasingly competitive and which will have a number of other collateral benefits, such as preventing millions of deaths every year linked to air pollution.

There will also be a need to invest in energy infrastructure, to replace aging capacity, and meet growing global energy demand, but also to boost efficiency. More generally, it is estimated that over the next 20 years global investment in infrastructure will be in the region of $5-6 trillion per year, three quarters of which will be new infrastructure in the developing world. Since well over half of total greenhouse emissions stem from investment in and use of various infrastructures, there is an overwhelming need, going forward, for all new such investments to be clean and green.

Investment in conservation to redress some of the damage done to the environment through decades of neglect will also be key. Something like US$100-200 billion should be spent annually to protect topsoil in croplands, to stabilize water tables, to restore fisheries, and protect biological diversity. This sum of money is small in relation to the size of the global economy and it is certainly very small in relation to the trillions made available by governments in some of the largest countries to deal with the short-term effects of the last global financial crisis.

Why education and technology matter for poverty eradication

The former director of the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group, Augusto Lopez-Claros, has written and lectured extensively on those factors and policies which are central in the fight against global poverty. Two areas whose importance he has highlighted concern the role of education and technology. In his lectures he has argued that education is critical for development and for nurturing a capacity for innovation and noted the progress made in the past 50 years. By the turn of the century well over half of the world’s countries had primary enrolment rates of 100 per cent as opposed to only 28 percent in 1960. Yet illiteracy is still a fact of life in many developing nations, with close to 800 million people in the world still unable to read or write. Lack of such basic skills severely limits the possibilities of citizens to participate in the development process, to be gainfully employed, to be well-informed judges of government policies and politicians, and not to fall captives to the manipulations of demagogues. From a business perspective, without access to workers with a basic education, companies are limited to resource- or basic labor-intensive industries and constrained in their ability to grow and to move up the value chain.

However, enrollment rates in themselves do not tell the whole story, as they disguise important differences in the quality of education. An artificial focus on enrolment rates, has often obscured the importance of the quality of learning, and the role of incentives and motivation of teachers and students. As the global economy has become more complex, to compete and maintain a presence in global markets it is essential to boost the human capital endowments of the labor force, whose members must have access to new knowledge, be constantly trained in new processes and in the operation of the latest technologies. Numerous experts have emphasized the need for high educational standards as well as education and training that has a strong practical orientation. As coverage of primary education has expanded rapidly in the developing world, higher education has gained importance. Thus, countries which have invested heavily in a well-developed infrastructure for tertiary education have reaped enormous benefits in terms of growth. Education has been a particularly important driver in the development of the capacity for technological innovation, as the experience of Finland, Korea, Taiwan, and Israel clearly shows.

An increasingly important factor in explaining successful economic development concerns the agility with which an economy adopts existing technologies to enhance the productivity of its industries. In fact, the relative importance of technology for competitiveness has been increasing in recent years, as progress in the dissemination of knowledge and the increasing use of information and communications technologies have become increasingly widespread. This requires an environment that is conducive to innovative activity, supported by both the public and the private sectors. In particular, this means sufficient business investment in research and development, high-quality scientific research institutions, collaboration in research between universities and industry, and protection of intellectual property.

Equality of Women = Prosperity for All: a book by Augusto Lopez-Claros

Equality for Women = Prosperity for All
Image: amazon.com

Augusto Lopez-Claros is an international economist with over thirty years of experience in international organizations, including most recently at the World Bank. Drawing on his long experience as an economist, he partnered with author Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, to publish a probing new book, Equality for Women = Prosperity for All (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). The work covers in depth an array of impressively researched topics, including law, violence against women, culture, employment and political representation—far beyond the usual discussion of equal pay for equal work—to make an important, often overlooked point. Gender discrimination is often viewed from the perspective of human rights, as embedded in the Universal Declaration, and the more recent Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Their work takes a new approach, recognizing that, not only does gender discrimination lack a basis in any credible system of moral and ethical principles, but it undermines human prosperity itself. Their research shows that the pervasive discrimination against women in virtually every sphere of human life constitutes a wholly unworkable foundation for allocating resources and for creating wealth and opportunity. Each chapter lays out the reasons for the heavy price humanity has paid over the past several hundred years for the overwhelming domination by men in government and the political process. The book asks the fundamental question: is gender equality a prerequisite not only for a prosperous world, but for a world at peace with itself and with the environment? It presents the policies and values that mean that being born female or male will no longer be a measure of whether a human being will be allowed to develop his or her potential.

Equality for Women = Prosperity for All has been widely reviewed and praised by readers. Alyson Colón of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto wrote, “This is an ideal book for policymakers who need to understand the broader picture of gender inequality and its impact.” Another reader, Nancy Birdsall, former executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, wrote that the book made for “a compelling and often disturbing read by two authors well read in other social sciences,… and with a fluid command of the pen. The chapter on violence against women is gripping and disturbing, its commonality amply documented” adding this personal note: “Do not overlook the chapter on culture, with its argument that incentives are what matter, and its thorough rejection of doctrinal beliefs as legitimate “cultural” traditions – a message for the Taliban and the Pope as well.” Veronika Bard, Swedish Ambassador to Switzerland wrote that the book “shines a spotlight on the discrimination and injustice that keep women and girls in the shadows of society, shows the links between gender stereotyping and oppression, between domestic violence and political instability and highlights how the costs of gender inequality are borne not only by the individual but by society as a whole.”