This desk review explores the links between infrastructure development and women's time poverty in Asia and the Pacific by drawing on time-use data and reviewing existing research and evidence from impact evaluations. Three questions are asked: (i) What contribution does infrastructure make in reducing women's time poverty, and how is this being recorded? (ii) Are women's time savings resulting from increased access to infrastructure used for productive work that also reduces consumption poverty? (iii) Can infrastructure projects more effectively reduce both time and consumption poverty for women?

The papers in this volume examine the links between gender, time use, and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa. They contribute to a broader definition of poverty to include "time poverty," and to a broader definition of work to include household work. The papers present a conceptual framework linking both market and household work, review some of the available literature and surveys on time use in Africa, and use tools and approaches drawn from analysis of consumption-based poverty to develop the concept of a time poverty line and to examine linkages between time poverty, consumption poverty, and ot.

Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) investments are widely seen as essential for improving health in early childhood. However, the experimental literature on WASH interventions identifies inconsistent impacts on child health outcomes, with relatively robust impacts on diarrhea and other symptoms of infection, but weak and varying impacts on child nutrition. In contrast, observational research exploiting cross-sectional variation in water and sanitation access is much more sanguine, finding strong associations with diarrhea prevalence, mortality and stunting. In practice, both literatures suffer from significant methodological limitations. Experimental WASH evaluations are often subject to poor compliance, rural bias, and short duration of exposure, while cross-sectional observational evidence may be highly vulnerable to omitted variables bias. To overcome some of the limitations of both literatures, we construct a panel of 442 subnational regions in 59 countries with multiple Demographic Health Surveys. This large subnational panel is used to implement difference-in-difference regressions that allow us to examine whether longer term changes in water and sanitation at the subnational level predict improvements in child morbidity, mortality and nutrition. We find results that are partially consistent with both literatures. Improved water access is statistically insignificantly associated with most outcomes, although water piped into the dwelling predicts reductions in child stunting. Improvements in sanitation predict large reductions in diarrhea prevalence and child mortality, but are not associated with changes in stunting or wasting. We estimate that sanitation improvements can account for just under 10% of the decline in child mortality from 1990-2015.

Women make up a little over half of the world’s population, but their contribution to measured economic activity and growth is far below its potential. Despite significant progress in recent decades, labor markets across the world remain divided along gender lines, and progress toward gender equality seems to have stalled. The challenges of growth, job creation, and inclusion are closely intertwined. This volume brings together key research by IMF economists on issues related to gender and macroeconomics. In addition to providing policy prescriptions and case studies from IMF member countries, the chapters also look at the gender gap from an economic point of view.

Given the lack of consensus around how to measure empowerment in WASH, mapping existing indicators to two frameworks frequently used in the empowerment literature illustrates knowledge gaps. We identified 290 gender-sensitive indicators across nine WASH themes that were mapped to the Reach-Benefit-Empower and Resources-Agency-Achievements frameworks. Most indicators measure “Benefit” and/or “Resources.” Existing gender-sensitive indicators capturing empowerment and agency in WASH are lacking; only 10.3% of indicators capture “Empower” and 24.8% of indicators capture “Agency.”

This book has an Open Access chapter. Throughout the volume, expert practitioners situate their real-world experiences in the broader intersectional framework employed by their academic colleagues, offering policy makers, students, scholars, practitioners, and activists concrete examples of how and why gender is central to development

The proposed SDN discusses the specific macro-critical aspects of women’s participation in the labor market and the constraints that prevent women from developing their full economic potential. Building on earlier Fund analysis, work undertaken by other organizations and academic research, the SDN presents possible policies to overcome these obstacles in different types of countries.