Helping women is thus not simply a matter of social justice (a desirable goal in and of itself); it is essential to promoting sustained growth in Haiti. From this perspective, and as discussed in this paper, specific measures designed to help women (in areas such as employment, health care, and education) must be implemented early on, at the inception of the recovery program—rather than assuming or hoping that the benefits of the reconstruction effort will somehow “trickle down” to them.

By implication, improved access to core infrastructure services may enable women to devote more time to market activity for instance, possibly reducing the gender gap and promoting growth. At the same time, it may lead to improved learning monitoring (in the case of electricity, for instance) as well as improved child care practices (including breast feeding), which may strengthen the health status of children and their ability to learn.<sup>15</sup> Greater access to safe water and sanitation in schools may also raise attendance rates for girls. However, it is possible that the increase in time that women devote to market work come at the expense of time allocated to child care; if so, and given health persistence, the longer-run effects on growth could be mitigated, or possibly reversed—despite the fact that higher earnings may allow mothers to spend more on goods and medical supplies for their children. The key issue to address therefore is how an improvement in the quality and quantity of infrastructure affects, both directly and indirectly, the time women allocate to these various activities and how, in turn, changes in women's time allocation affect economic growth.

# **III. AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK**

While many studies have examined the relationship between gender, growth, and development, there have been few attempts to rigorously model the role of inter- and intragenerational (or vertical and horizontal) health externalities, and the impact of access to infrastructure on women’s time allocation in this context. In this section we present a threeperiod, gender-based overlapping generations (OLG) model of economic growth with public capital that captures both of these aspects.<sup>16</sup> 15In developed countries, a number of studies have focused on how greater access to consumer durables (made possible by improved technologies and access to electricity) helped to “liberate” women from domestic production activities and led to dramatic increases in married female labor-force participation. Studies for the United States include Greenwood and Seshadri (2005), Greenwood et al. (2005), and Coen-Pirani et al. (2010); Cavalcanti and Tavares (2008) provide a cross-country analysis. Coen-Pirani et al., in particular, estimated the effect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using microlevel data from the 1960 and 1970 US Censuses. The results show that the diffusion of household appliances contributed significantly to the increase in married women’s labor force participation rates during the 1960s. It may also be an explanatory factor for the subsequent increase—today, 80 percent of college-educated women are in the labor force, compared to 62 percent in 1963; as of July 2010, women accounted for almost 47 percent of the work force and 51 percent of professional workers. However, the spread of contraception methods may have played an equally (if not more) important role in the latter expansion, by allowing women to postpone marriage and child bearing, and increasing their incentives to invest time in the acquisition of advanced skills.

16The model both simplifies—by excluding human capital aspects—and integrates the models in Agénor (2009) and Agénor and Agénor (2009), while focusing on different issues. A brief summary of the literature on gender-based OLG models is provided in Box 4. None of the existing contributions, however, 16