Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

697 items available

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10986/9388

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 10 of 39

Making Progress on Parental Benefits in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-24) Jain, Himanshi; Sharma, Ambika; Cherchi, Ludovica
The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in employment would increase long-run gross domestic product (GDP) per capita by 20 percent (Pennings 2022). Realizing this achievement, however, depends not only on removing gender barriers to employment but also and most emphatically on improving the quality of women’s employment. Women’s labor force participation has been stagnant since 1990, at around 53 percent for women compared to 80 percent for men, with the largest gaps in lower-middle-income countries (World Bank 2023). Moreover, as noted by the World Bank’s most recent gender strategy, “Women in the labor force are half as likely as men to have a full-time wage job, their jobs tend to be more vulnerable, and they earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn” (World Bank 2023). This note compiles findings from a study undertaken in two countries—one low income (Nepal) and one middle income (Argentina)—to examine the take-up of existing parental benefits and how parental benefit policies (or the lack thereof) influenced women’s labor market choices, childcare responsibilities, and well-being.
Understanding Women’s Lower Participation than Men as Workers, Top Managers, and Owners in Private Firms in the EU-27 Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-27) Amin, Mohammad
This Brief examines issues related to women’s participation as workers, top managers, and owners of private firms in 27 European Union countries (EU-27), using the rich database of the World Bank Enterprise Surveys. The analysis focuses on EU regions varying between about 800,000 and 3 million inhabitants (NUTS2-level groupings). Overall, women’s participation as workers, top managers, and firm owners is statistically significantly less than that of men. Surprisingly, richer NUTS2 regions experience a larger gender gap favoring men in employment, top manager positions, and firm ownership. Another worrying feature is that relative to men, women workers tend to be concentrated in firms that are less productive and pay low wages. Thus, closing gender gaps in income requires not just more jobs but also better quality of jobs for women. Having a woman as the top manager of the firm is associated with a higher share of women workers in the firm, but this effect is much stronger when the firm initially has a relatively high share of women workers. A gender gap also exists in labor productivity, which is lower for women-run firms than men-run firms, and for firms with higher women’s ownership. These gaps in labor productivity are much larger at lower quantiles of labor productivity, implying the presence of sticky floors but not necessarily glass ceilings in the EU-27 countries. The Brief identifies some of the factors that are correlated with the average gender labor productivity gap and estimates their contribution to the gap. There is no systematic difference in the level of constraints, including access to finance, faced by men-run versus women-run firms and/or by firms at different levels of women’s ownership.
Sex-disaggregating Tax Administrative Data: Experience from Colombia’s Tax and Customs Authority
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-06) Gamboa, Luis Fernando; Reyes, Luis Carlos; Tribin, Ana Maria; Komatsu, Hitomi
This Knowledge Note aims to document National Tax and Customs Authority's (DIAN’s) experience in sex-disaggregating income taxpayer data and provide examples of the use of disaggregated data for policy analysis. It offers lessons for other revenue authorities and government agencies planning to sex-disaggregate and analyze administrative tax data. It summarizes the institutional strategies, methodologies used, and challenges encountered in this process based on interviews with experts and government officials. We use the term “sex” to mean biological sex at birth unless explicitly stated otherwise.
What do We Know About Interventions to Increase Women’s Economic Participation and Empowerment in South Asia?: Financial Products
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-04-07) Javed, Amna; Zahra, Najaf; Boudet, Ana Maria Munoz
The World Bank’s South Asia Region Gender Innovation Lab (SARGIL) is conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of interventions with direct or indirect effects on measures of women’s economic empowerment. The review focuses on changes in labor market outcomes, income, and other empowerment indicators. The goal is to document what has and has not worked for women in the region (covering all countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), understand the types of interventions implemented, and identify gaps in knowledge and action. Interventions are organized into five categories: Skills, Assets, Financial Products, Care, and Empowerment. This brief summarizes the main findings from the financial products category.
The Importance of Designing Gender and Disability Inclusive Laws: A Survey of Legislation in 190 Economies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09-12) Braunmiller, Julia Constanze; Dry, Marie
Women with disabilities face additional barriers to their participation in the economy and society compared to men, with and without disabilities, and relative to nondisabled women, resulting in unequal parental rights, discrimination in their private life and the workplace, reduced employment opportunities, lower earnings, and high exposure to gender-based violence. The legal recognition of multiple forms of discrimination is a vital first step to address and, ultimately, enforce the human rights of women with disabilities and protect them from discriminatory practices. The law is thus one key element to achieve their full inclusion and enable societies to thrive in the long run. This Brief presents data collected by the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law project on the legal barriers that women with disabilities face when accessing economic opportunities in 190 economies. The new data suggest that only one-quarter of economies worldwide explicitly protect and promote the rights of women with disabilities.
Gender Wage Gap in Thailand
(Washington, DC, 2022-09) World Bank
The gender wage gap in Thailand is much less significant than in most countries in the world. The average hourly wage among female workers, in fact, slightly surpasses that of males. This highly equitable gender wage pattern is seen at all levels of the wage distribution. Female representation is also quite equal at all levels of wages; the likelihood of finding females in low-wage jobs is as high as in high-wage jobs. One important factor driving this gender wage parity is the higher educational attainment among female workers.
Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment in Payment Projects: A Short Module to Complement Context-Specific Measures
(Washington, DC, 2022-07) World Bank
Cash transfers and digital payments hold promise for women’s economic empowerment through their potential to enhance women’s privacy, financial autonomy, decision making and labor force participation. Yet, despite this potential, gaps in data and evidence persist. This brief aims to provide actionable advice on measurement for project teams working on digital government-to-person (G2P) projects, as well as practitioners and researchers working on cash transfer payments and financial inclusion more broadly. It is not meant to serve as a comprehensive guide to women’s economic empowerment. Instead, the brief provides short measures focused on key outcomes related to women’s economic empowerment as a complement to more in-depth context-specific measures. The indicators suggested in this guide can be used for measurement in impact evaluations, monitoring and evaluation, or general population descriptions.
Challenging Entrenched Marital Power in South Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04-29) Arekapudi, Nisha; Mazoni Silva Martins, Natália
This brief examines more than thirty years of legal reform aimed at removing husbands’ marital power at the expense of their wives from South African legislation. For decades, marital power relegated wives to a position akin to minors, with devastating effects on women’s economic empowerment. Removing the many components of this form of discrimination from national law has required not only a conducive political environment, but also sustained momentum from the women’s rights movement and selective, strategic litigation that challenges the varied effects. Such reforms have directly and positively affected women’s economic inclusion. While efforts to improve gender equality in South Africa are ongoing, the analysis offers important insights on optimal contexts for change, the role women play in advocacy efforts, and the benefits of reform for economic growth.
Brazil – COVID-19 in Latin America and Caribbean: 2021 High Frequency Phone Surveys - Results Phase Two, Wave One
(Washington, DC, 2022-04) World Bank
Brazil has been one of the countries most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the region. In June 2021, it was the country with the second-highest rate of deaths per million and the fourth by the number of cases per million in Latin America and the Caribbean. The effects of the health crisis were broad and still evident a year and a half into the pandemic. In line with pre-existing vulnerability profiles, the pandemic affected the Brazilian population differently in the labor market. At the time of the survey, the proportion of people who lost their pre-pandemic job and were not working was 29.1 percent. This proportion was highest among the elderly (57.8 percent), those with primary education or less (42.7 percent), women (41.4 percent) and rural workers (38.7 percent). About 58 percent of those who lost their jobs became inactive, and most of the new inactive were women (68.9 percent). Simultaneously, 29.2 percent of the previously inactive entered the labor force during the pandemic, though one-quarter of them were unemployed in mid-2021. Women represented a majority among the new active (64.3 percent). Finally, the pandemic resulted in higher informality rates among those who remained employed.
Key Ingredients to Women’s Legal Rights in Kenya
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03-24) Githae, Catherine Nyaguthii; Galiano, Emilia; Nyagah, Fredrick J.K.; Recavarren, Isabel Santagostino
Legislative reforms to increase gender equality before the law are often long and complex processes. This brief focuses on a series of reforms in Kenya, specifically, the adoption of the Sexual Offenses Act of 2006, the Employment Act of 2007, and the Protection Against Domestic Violence Act of 2015. Strong evidence, broad coalitions, and incorporating the highest standards based on international best practice in early legal drafts are singled out as the key elements that led to the successful adoption of these landmark laws promoting women’s rights in Kenya. The lessons in this brief can provide important insights for policy makers, advocacy groups and international organizations involved in the pursuit of legal gender equality in Kenya and other countries.