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The Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base (GID-DB) is a new cross-country research tool with comprehensive measures of gender equality. It improves upon existing sources because it is the only data base on gender that systematically incorporates indicators of social norms, traditions and family law. The GID-DB thereby permits analysis of hypotheses that link cultural practices to gender equality, human development and economic growth. A cross-country comparison of the data indicates that inequalities in social institutions are particularly pronounced in countries with low female literacy rates, but correlate less strongly with Gross Domestic Product per capita. Similarly, our econometric analysis suggests a clearly negative correlation between gender inequality of the OECD Development Center and women's labor-force participation.*The views expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the authors

To analyze the e ect of asset inequality on cooperation within a group, we consider a twoplayer noncooperative model of conservation of a common-pool resource CPR : a shery. W e give necessary and su cient conditions such that conservation is a Nash equilibrium, and we show that increasing inequality does not, in general, favor full conservation. However, once inequality is su ciently great, further inequality m a y push the players closer to e ciency. T h us the relationship between inequality and economic e ciency is U-shaped. We analyze the implications for conservation if players have earning opportunities outside the commons. Finally, w e consider various schemes of community regulation of the commons in the light of the noncooperative model with or without exit options. We nd that increases in inequality m a y restrict the range of implementable mechanisms.

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