# **I.  INTRODUCTION**

The role of women in promoting growth and development continues to occupy center stage in policy debates. As documented in a number of studies, gender inequality (in terms of access to education, health, formal sector employment, and income) remains a significant constraint to growth in many countries.<sup>1</sup> On the one hand, the gender gap in educational attainment has gradually narrowed or moved in favor of women in some regions; and in many individual countries the gender gap in primary school enrollment has almost disappeared. According to the United Nations (2010) for instance, in 2007 over 95 girls for every 100 boys of primary school age were in school in developing countries, compared with 91 in 1999. In a study of four decades of birth cohorts covering the period 1940-80 for Latin America and Caribbean, Duryea et al. (2007) found that the gender gap in educational attainment has moved in favor of females at an average pace of 0.27 years of schooling per decade. On the other hand, however, 54 percent of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa still do not complete even a primary school education (Herz and Sperling (2004), UNICEF (2005)). In addition, progress towards gender equality in secondary schooling has been slower, and in some regions, gaps are widening. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the percentage of enrollment of girls compared with boys in secondary education fell from 82 percent in 1999 to 79 percent in 2007 (United Nations (2010)). Only 53 of the 171 countries with available data had achieved gender parity in both primary and secondary education during that period. At this rate, achieving the Millennium Development Goal of complete parity by 2015 appears to be out of reach for many countries (see World Bank (2010)).

Related in part to gender bias in education, in today's low- and middle-income countries the labor force participation rate for women is only 57 percent, compared to 85 percent for men (International Labour Office (2010)). In most regions female employment is concentrated in either services or agriculture, with fewer women than men employed in industry. Gender inequality in health remains large as well; maternal mortality rates in many developing countries have only declined marginally (United Nations (2010)). Combined with gender bias in the work place, the consequence is large pay differentials. According to data compiled by UNIFEM (2008), the gender pay gap ranges from 3 percent to 51 percent, with a global average of 17 percent. Seven out of ten of the world's poor are women or girls, so a focus on poverty reduction involves necessarily addressing their plight.

This paper focuses on two aspects of the debate on the role of women in growth and development: the role of inter- and intra-generational health externalities (namely, how mothers affect their children’s health, and how health in childhood affects health in adulthood) and constraints on women’s time allocation—particularly lack of access to infrastructure—and how, in turn, policy-induced changes in such allocation affect growth.<sup>2</sup> In line with the above evidence, much research on gender and growth in developing countries

> 1See Blackden and Bhanu (1999), Blackden et al. (2006), Morrison, Raju, and Sinha (2007), Nallari and Griffith (2009), and Momsen (2009). Some of the recent evidence is further discussed in subsequent sections. 2Lazear (1983) provides one of the first systematic discussions of the concept of intergenerational externalities. A key point of his contribution was to draw attention to the negative externalities that may result when parents underinvest in themselves (both in terms of education and health) because they fail to consider spillover benefits to their children.

3