The Costs of Missing the Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equity

Dina Abu-Ghaida and Stephan Klasen

Discussion Papers in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics

Abstract: 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 14 per 1000 higher rates of under five mortality and 2.4 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.

JEL-codes: I2 J16 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2/1/0301_klasen.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Costs of Missing the Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equity (2004)
Working Paper: The Costs of Missing the Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equity (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lmu:muenec:2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Economics from University of Munich, Department of Economics Ludwigstr. 28, 80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tamilla Benkelberg ().