Image by DFAT on Flickr Voice and Agency: empowering women and girls for shared prosperity is a major new report by the World Bank that shines a spotlight on the value of empowerment, the patterns of constraints that limit their realization, and the associated costs, not only to individual women but to their families, communities, and societies. It highlights promising policies and interventions, and it identifies priority areas where further research and more and better data and evidence are needed.

This paper assesses the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Although the GDI has increased attention on gender equality in human development, it suffers from several limitations. A major problem is that it conflates relative gender equality with absolute levels of human development and thus gives no information on comparative gender inequality among countries. Using the same indicators as the GDI, the paper constructs a Relative Status of Women (RSW) index, which demonstrates how using a measure of gender equality that abstracts from levels of development results in very different country rankings. However, the RSW is not an ideal measure of gender inequality. The GDI indicators are not the most appropriate ones for measuring gender inequality and hence both the RSW and the GDI have limited validity. The paper concludes by offering a conceptual framework that provides the basis for an alternative measure of gender inequality.Human Development Index, Gender Development Index, Socio-ECONOMIC Gender Inequality, International Comparisons, Measuring Economic Development,

Is development best achieved by going for growth, or does specific attention need to be paid to directly improving human welfare? In contrast to the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, the World Bank has stressed the growth approach. Recent work has reinforced this position by arguing that health spending is extremely ineffective in reducing infant or child mortality, which is mainly explained by a country's income per capita. This article contests this position through testing the robustness of determinants of infant and child mortality. We have estimated over 420,000 equations which show that, while income per capita is a robust determinant of infant and child mortality, so are indicators of health, education and gender inequality. Some health spending, such as immunisation, is thus shown to be cost effective way of saving lives. Our results are consistent with the view that much health spending in developing countries may be poorly targeted or otherwise ineffective, but do not support the position that public health strategies should not be given too great a role in pursuing improvements in human welfare.

While central notions around agency are well established in the academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learnt from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for 58 countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. Our findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multi-dimensionality mean that interpretation of results is not always straightforward.

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During the late 1980s and early 1990s improvements in health and education and progress in poverty reduction ground to a halt, or began to be eroded, in many developing regions and in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The DAC International Development Targets (IDTs) reflect the concern of development agencies and their developing country partners about these trends (see Table 1 in the Overview article in this issue). The present article considers whether these targets are attainable.The structure of the article is as follows. The following two sections review the economic literature and examine what data from the 1980s and 1990s can tell us about the determinants of changes in poverty and human development over this period. The next two sections outline the methods of the poverty projections and give estimates of poverty in 2015 under various scenarios, followed by projections for the human development targets with estimates for infant, under-five and maternal mortality and primary school enrolment rates. The final section draws together the key conclusions regarding the attainability of the DAC targets. Modelling poverty and human developmentEarlier attempts to assess the attainability of the DAC targets Demery and Walton, 1998) are based on the premise that poverty reduction and human development improvement can be specified as functions of income growth alone. However, this is a simplification that could produce misleading results, as research shows that other variables are also important determinants. Poverty elasticity and income inequalityThe relationship between income growth and poverty reduction is given by the poverty elasticity, namely the percentage change in the poverty headcount 12 Development Policy Review 1. There are two approaches to poverty elasticity estimation -the analytic and the econometric (see Hanmer et al., 1999 for a discussion of their relative merits).2. i.e. the effect of resource reallocation from low to high productivity sectors, the sectoral shift that is associated with Kuznets' inverted 'U' trajectory.3. The Timmer sample of the Deininger and Squire dataset covers 3.3 billion people in 1995 or two-thirds of the population in low-and middle-income countries, with agriculture being a quarter of GDP and employing half the labour force.

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