Gender Equality and Economic Growth in the World Bank World Development Report 2006

Abstract

This contribution examines how gender equality features in the World Bank's World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, focusing on its conceptual framework, use of empirical evidence, and policy recommendations. It concludes that despite acknowledging that liberalization and privatization have been captured by elites for their own benefit, the report still clings to a neoclassical understanding of how markets and competition work. Moreover, although the report emphasizes gender inequality in opportunities as a trap that hinders economic growth, it shows no understanding of economic growth as a gendered process in which old forms of gender inequality are weakened but new forms of gender inequality emerge.

Keywords:

• Economic development
• economic growth
• equality
• gender
• World Bank
• JEL Codes: B54, D63, O1

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the three reviewers and the editors for their helpful comments. Also, thanks to the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University for providing facilities to enable me to revise this paper while a Visiting Professor in Fall 2008.

Notes

¹ For a useful discussion of this, see Global Social Policy Forum (2006).

² The same is true of the World Bank Policy Research Report Engendering Development through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice (World Bank 2001).

³ The variety of views of World Bank Executive Directors is accommodated with a typical “get-out clause”: “This report will not prescribe what is equitable for any society. That is the prerogative of its members to be undertaken through decision-making processes they regard as fair” (World Bank 2006: 20).

⁴ Program loans support a sector or countrywide program of new policies.

⁵ The CEDAW Committee, which monitors implementation of the convention, has argued the convention calls not for “equity” but for “equality” (see, for example, United Nations 2005: 47] and United Nations 2007: 4]).

⁶ The WDR2006 allows for some structural, system-wide economic, social, and political factors in preventing equal opportunities, but once equal opportunities have been established by removing these impediments, only individual factors, like luck and personal qualities, are perceived as hindering fair outcomes.

⁷ Phillips (2004) notes that this oversight is also prevalent in much contemporary academic writing on inequality, which focuses more on individual variation in talents and preferences than on structural factors.

⁸ It is pertinent to note that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to the right to “an adequate standard of living,” and states have an immediate obligation to ensure that “minimum core standards” are met in realizing this right (Henry Steiner and Philip Alston 1996: 256–328).

⁹ In merely gesturing toward human rights, the WDR2006 appears to share the view, widespread among mainstream economists, that human rights norms and standards do not provide guidance on how to deal with policy in the presence of resource constraints (for an expression of this view, see Tzannatos 2006: 31]). However, while human rights norms and standards are not able to determine all the details of economic policy, they do provide guidance on what policies violate human rights obligations and on how to improve policies to secure greater compliance with human rights (Diane Elson 2006; Radhika Balakrishnan 2007).

¹⁰ For instance, on the opening page of the report, a contrast is drawn between the opportunities of a poor black girl and a rich white boy in South Africa, and we read that they “could hardly be held responsible for their family circumstances: their race, their parents' income and education, their urban or rural location, or indeed, their sex” (italics added). And in the next paragraph, the point is made that the opportunities of this girl and boy are very different “by virtue of their gender, socialization, their geographic location, and their access to schools” (World Bank 2006: 1, italics added).

¹¹ This is reminiscent of “Redistribution with Growth,” the strategy espoused by the World Bank in the early 1970s (Hollis Chenery, John Duloy, and Richard Jolly 1974).

¹² See, for example, Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, and Bo Gustafsson (1993) and Richard Arena and Christian Longhi (1998).

¹³ The examples Chang discusses include child labor, polluting production processes, and workers' rights. Measures to ban imports produced with child labor, or by polluting production processes, or with low-paid non-union labor may be seen as legitimate from a developed country point of view; but as means of protection of developed country businesses from a developing country point of view.

¹⁴ Thus, attempts to incorporate labor and environmental standards in international trade agreements may be judged by firms and governments in developing countries as tilting the playing field against them.

¹⁵ See, for example, Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly (1994) and Jane Humphries and Jill Rubery (1995).

¹⁶ This point is argued in more detail by John Roemer (2006) in his critique of the WDR2006.

¹⁷ For example, the concept is explained at length in a two-page box entitled “Inequality traps stifle economic development in a north Indian village” (World Bank 2006: 26–7). There is no comparable box entitled “Inequality traps stifle development in a low-income, ethnic minority district in a North American/Western European city.”

¹⁸ The Sachs version of the trap is an example of this danger: foreign aid is the key factor that springs the trap (Sachs 2005: chapter 3).

¹⁹ This claim is based on Caridad Araujo, Francisco Ferreira, and Norbert Schady, (2004).

²⁰ The report correctly notes that income and consumption capture different dimensions of economic welfare, with income better seen as a measure of opportunity and consumption better seen as a measure of achievement (World Bank 2006: 38). But, since some countries have data on household income and some on household expenditure, this difference is not systematically maintained, and data referring to income is merged with data referring to expenditure.

²¹ This is not to suggest that decomposition by sex of household head should have been included. Rather, it would have been useful to draw attention to the point that such decompositions are based on household survey data sets, and measure only interhousehold inequality, while assuming intrahousehold inequality is zero. This would have been consistent with the report's recognition that there is inequality within households in its discussion of the inequality trap for women (World Bank 2006: 53).

²² Of course, data to do this are not readily available, but that needs noting and criticizing.

²³ For more discussion of the ambiguities of welfare economics, see Chang (2001).

²⁴ Though there is no human rights treaty that explicitly justifies taxation, the clarification of rights and obligations produced by the various UN bodies responsible for monitoring the implementation of treaties, and the reports of the Special Rapporteurs appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights, make it plain that taxation is not in itself a form of expropriation or violation of property rights, and indeed is a necessary instrument for the realization of human rights (Elson 2006).

²⁵ Several feminist economists contributed to this report, which is reviewed in Feminist Economics by Caren Grown (2007).