This article analyzes the relationship between abortion and female education. It provides new empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa to show that more liberal abortion policies are associated with a higher female secondary school enrollment. It is assumed in the model that easier access to...

This paper discusses social protection initiatives in the context of developing countries and explores the opportunities they present for promoting a gender-equality agenda and women's empowerment. The paper begins with a brief introduction on the emergence of social protection (SP) and how it...

Historically, episodes of rapid growth are accompanied by significant structural change. In this paper we therefore aim to quantify the extent to which factor accumulation induces structural change and productivity growth in industrializing economies. To fix ideas we present an extension of...

Unlike previous empirical studies that focus on barriers to entry in international trade, we focus on barriers to exit as measured by passport costs for a crosssection of countries. We test four common theories on the determinants of such exit barriers and find that macroeconomic and brain-drain...

In this paper, the author deals with the question how to make PAYG pension systems financially resistant to fluctuating fertility rates. The author presents two pension schemes that lead to a permanently balanced budget but differ in the mixture of changes in the contribution rates and...

In this paper I study how PAYG pension systems of the notional defined contribution type can be designed such that they remain financially stable in the presence of increasing life expectancy. For this to happen two crucial parameters must be set in an appropriate way. First, the remaining life...

In this paper I study the impact of increasing longevity on pay-as-you-go pension systems. First, I show that increasing longevity increases their internal rate of return. The size of the effect di ers for di erent policy regimes. It is higher for the case where the retirement age is increased...