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Ensuring that the world economy and its citizens have sufficient infrastructure—from transport systems to electricity grids and water pipelines—is an increasingly pressing issue. It’s also a subject matter surrounded by misconceptions. Five are worth noting: 1) Lack of investment is not always to blame. The first is a common assumption that when infrastructure is too inadequate, congested, or...
Bread, civil society, bank charges, and Competition Authorities: what do these have in common? The surprising answer is that these elements help explain how South Africa’s Competition Authorities have become a standout success in the country’s economic policy making. Nowadays, competition policy forms a central pillar of South Africa’s development strategy, and the South African Competition Authorities...
(image: Sean Graham, Flickr Creative Commons) It has become mainstream to think that digital technologies will have a significant role to play in addressing the financial inclusion challenge in developing countries. This may be so, but if all we in the financial inclusion community do is merely add the mobile phone (or the smart card) to our stock of dearly-held beliefs, we will accomplish little. Technology...
David Francis The surest way to empower women, close the gender gap, and ensure women’s participation in the development of their economy is through enabling equal job opportunities and employment for women. Recent efforts such as the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project show that labor laws do vary between men and women. As we will see in three studies below, the law has an incredibly significant...
While it’s International Women’s Day tomorrow, many of us at infoDev are trying every day to make women, specifically women innovators, central to our strategy of supporting high-growth entrepreneurs in developing countries. But this is easier said than done as women are notoriously under-represented in tech-related industries and even more so in the area that I work in – clean technology – which is...
Leora Klapper International Women’s Day is when we celebrate the strides made towards equality, but it also reminds us that gender is a powerful determinant of economic opportunities, particularly in developing countries. Financial inclusion is one of the areas where we observe a gender gap—women in developing economies are still relatively more excluded from the financial sector than men, even after...
I recently attended the American Economic Association annual conference in San Diego—the world’s largest gathering for economists. There were more than 50 parallel sessions on a wide array of topics and several previews and presentations of papers –so there was a surplus of interesting ideas and insights. As an Economist who works in innovation, technology and entrepreneurship, I was particularly focused...
