Economist backs recommitment to world development goals

Economist backs recommitment to world development goals

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News Staff

The world can afford to combat poverty and inequality — as it promised at the Millennium Summit in 2000, economist Caren Grown, economist-in-residence at American University, told an audience at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Oct. 26.

CAREN GROWN

The 2000 summit adopted a series of time-bound targets known as Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that address extreme poverty in its many dimensions —  income poverty, hunger, disease and lack of adequate shelter and exclusion — and promote gender equality, education and environmental sustainability.

Grown is an American University economist-in-residence whose current research deals with assets, international trade and gender, and women’s well-being, gender equality and public finance. She focused on the goal that calls for promoting gender equality and empowering women.

“Gender equality is critical for poverty reduction,” she said, because data indicate women spend more money on children’s development (like food, education and health care) than men, while engaging in more unpaid work.

The issue of unpaid work is crucial, said Grown, because it has economic value that usually goes unreported. When women have to collect firewood, till fields or care for children, they cannot be engaged in formal, paid labor.

“Gender gaps,” Grown concluded, “are a break on economic growth.”

To achieve the gender equality component of the MDGs, Grown proposed seven strategic priorities: