While the overall picture for gender equality is still gloomy, recent changes in family institutions in come countries provide an enlightening example.

Informal employment persists, even when the economy is growing. Understanding the phenomenon is necessary to “tame the beast” of informality. Coherent policies are needed to create decent jobs and provide social protection

Sustainable development requires well co-ordinated and functioning formal and informal institutions. In developing countries, courts, regulations and formal conventions are often observed in the breach or fail to function. By default, informal institutions – tradition, culture, family...

The financing of health care is a major challenge for developing countries, especially since deficiencies in national health systems specifically harm the poor. Innovative financing mechanisms, such as private health insurance, offer benefits and risks. Their implementation requires caution on...

Decentralising health services – the transfer of power and responsibility from the central to the local level – should help the poor if local resources, accountability and governance are in good shape. The process in China and India had negative effects because local governments remained...

Decentralisation has become a key issue in development policy in the past two decades. Whereas the advantages and risks of transferring power and resources to local tiers of government have been debated for quite some time, it is only very recently that the linkages between decentralization and...

This policy insight introduces the Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base: a new tool to determine and analyse obstacles to women's economic development.

. Deeply rooted social institutions – societal norms, codes of conduct, laws and tradition – cause gender discrimination. . Religion per se does not systematically define such discrimination. All dominant religions show flexibility in interpreting the role of women in society. . The...

This paper analyses the effect of fiscal decentralisation on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level data. We find that counties in more fiscally decentralised provinces have lower infant mortality rates than counties where the provincial government remains...

Efforts to establish, test and analyse hypotheses regarding cross-country variations in women’s economic status are hampered by the lack of a readily accessible and easily used information resource on the various dimensions of gender inequality. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the <a href="http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/28/36223936.xls"...</a>