helping women generate income will increase their ability to “generate choices, exercise bargaining power, as well as develop a sense of self-worth, a belief in one’s ability to secure desired changes” (Elson and Keklik, 2000 cited in Brody et al, 2015). In their 2014 review, “Promoting Economic Empowerment: What Works?”, Buvinic and Furst-Nichols explicitly state they are only considering women’s productivity and earnings in their review, as “proxies for the more complex notion of empowerment” (Buvinić and Furst-Nichols 2014). The World Bank, in the 2016 edition of its flagship publication, _World Development Indicators,_ explicitly linked women’s income earning opportunities with women’s voice and agency in economic affairs (World Bank 2016, p. 10). Finally, Pereznieto and Taylor (2014) specify that _economic empowerment is a process which leads to women’s control over other areas of their lives_ . This raises two points: (i) once again causality from economic outcomes to other outcomes is included in the concept; and (ii) “control over other aspects of their lives” cannot be measured or by or inferred from only by labor market outcomes or expenditure decisions.

Yet the evidence on this causality is actually fairly weak. There is no doubt that poverty is disempowering as is individual lack of access to resources, as Duflo (2012) notes in her review of the evidence on economic development and empowerment. And while she finds substantial evidence that increased income earnings opportunities for women encourage parents to send their daughters to school, she also finds that these opportunities do not necessarily lead to broader empowerment as reflected in women’s status in society, the value of daughters relative to sons, political participation, or in the enforcement of laws on the books granting women equal rights. Kabeer (2013) uses measures such as values, perceptions and attitudes, role in decision-making within the household, quality of relations within and beyond the family, participation in local and national-level politics and collective action to protest injustice or claim rights, and correlates these with women’s education, labor force participation and types of employment in three countries. She finds that in three countries, secondary education and formal wage employment (the latter is almost always in the public sector as private firms were less likely to hire educated women) correlate most highly with the empowerment measures. However, the question of selectivity strongly limits the implications that can be drawn from this study. In other words, were the women already empowered, which is why they were able to get their education and to acquire a formal sector wage job? Is empowerment correlated more closely with class (richer households can afford to send their children for secondary education) than with gender? Somewhat weaker correlations were found with nonfarm self-employment, but again the question of selectivity looms.<sup>14</sup> In experimental analysis, Blattman finds no link between a highly effective program to help women in post-conflict Uganda start a self-employment trading business and improvements in women’s selfreported empowerment, as measured by women’s status in society, self-reported physical or emotional abuse by their partner, or self-reported independence (Blattman et al. 2016). Using self-reported participation in household decision-making on expenditures as a measure of economic empowerment, Banerjee et al. (2015) found no effect of a program which raised poor women’s earnings, assets, and household consumption in six countries on broader economic empowerment (the graduation projects). They do find qualitative evidence the program increased women’s self-esteem, which the participants linked to the positive outcomes. This provides some evidence for the link between a positive mindset – hope, self-esteem, etc. - and better economic outcomes.

> 14 Hanmer and Klugman (2016) find similar results using DHS data.

8