Does Changing Laws Make a Difference to Outcomes for Women and Girls?
Watch the event:
The last few years have seen some significant progress in legal reform worldwide affecting women and girls, from compulsory free primary education and land titling reform to increased legal age of marriage and the introduction of gender violence laws. This year’s edition of the World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law report tracks some of those changes but also asks ‘does changing laws make a difference to actual outcomes?’ That is the subject of ongoing research at the Center for Global Development covering early marriage, FGM and titling. This event will bring together the Women, Business and the Law team and CGD researchers to discuss the impact of legal reform – what we know and what it suggests for policymakers trying to improve outcomes for women and girls.
Women, Business and the Law 2016: An Overview
Augusto Lopez-Claros, Director of Global Indicators Group, World Bank Group
Getting to Equal
Tazeen Hasan, Senior Private Sector Development Specialist, Women, Business and the Law, World Bank Group
Augusto Lopez-Claros, Director of Global Indicators Group, World Bank Group
Charles Kenny, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development (Moderator)
From Law to Impact
Maitreyi Bordia Das, Global Lead on Social Inclusion, World Bank Group
Tazeen Hasan, Senior Private Sector Development Specialist, Women, Business and the Law, World Bank Group
Charles Kenny, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Justin Sandefur, Research Fellow, Center for Global Development
Mayra Buvinic, Senior Fellow, UN Foundation (Moderator)
Related Experts
Thursday, September 17
9:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Upcoming Events
In a recent paper, Kate Ambler and coauthors studied the impact of one-season cash transfers for agricultural investment in Senegal and Malawi, using data from a randomized control trial (RCT) in each country. They found evidence that transfers reduced both the number of decision makers and female decision making in Senegal in the short-run, particularly for measures directly related to agriculture. However, the effects disappeared two years after the transfers. Conversely, the authors find transfers in the Malawi program led to robust transitory increases in these measures, seeing a greater impact related to the number of decision makers in the household persisting after two year period. Join us for the latest CGD Invited Research Forum to discuss these opposing findings on the effects of cash transfers on household decision making.
Indian agriculture remains vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, and the looming threat of climate change may expose this vulnerability further. Using district-level data on temperature, rainfall and crop production, Siddharth Hari’s paper first documents a long-term trend of rising temperatures, declining average precipitation and increase in extreme precipitation events. One key finding is that the impact of temperature and rainfall are felt only in the extreme: when temperatures are much higher, rainfall is significantly lower, and the number of “dry days” greater is than normal. He also finds that these impacts are significantly more adverse in unirrigated areas (and hence rainfed crops) compared to irrigated areas. Can policy makers react to the challenges of climate change and find ways to get “more crop for every drop?"
Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time.
In their recent paper, Sam Asher and coauthors present new methods and new administrative data to overcome this gap, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. They find that the intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized "Scheduled Castes" is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. These findings contest the conventional wisdom that marginalized groups in India have been catching up on average. The paper also explores heterogeneity across space, generating the first high-resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5600 rural subdistricts and 2300 cities and towns.
Commentary Menu