This paper assesses the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Although the GDI has increased attention on gender equality in human development, it suffers from several limitations. A major problem is that it conflates relative gender equality with absolute levels of human development and thus gives no information on comparative gender inequality among countries. Using the same indicators as the GDI, the paper constructs a Relative Status of Women (RSW) index, which demonstrates how using a measure of gender equality that abstracts from levels of development results in very different country rankings. However, the RSW is not an ideal measure of gender inequality. The GDI indicators are not the most appropriate ones for measuring gender inequality and hence both the RSW and the GDI have limited validity. The paper concludes by offering a conceptual framework that provides the basis for an alternative measure of gender inequality.Human Development Index, Gender Development Index, Socio-ECONOMIC Gender Inequality, International Comparisons, Measuring Economic Development,

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Both the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) represent a “false start” in measuring gender equality. This is because they do not measure gender (in)equality as such, but an odd combination of absolute welfare levels and gender equality that is not easy to interpret. This note argues that the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report Office should take the lead in either constructing a new index for measuring gender equality or elaborating a revised GDI and revised GEM that do measure gender equality. Detailed recommendations are given for both possibilities on how this can be done, partly on the basis of a brief review of alternatives presented in the literature.Gender equality, Human development, Measurement,

This article analyses the effectiveness of the setting of policy conditions in exchange for aid. Given the emerging consensus that this process is not effective, this article focuses on explaining why not. In analysing the experiences of eight countries -Bangladesh, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zambia -an 'augmented' principal-agent framework proved valuable in explaining why policy conditionality is not effective in these countries. The article concludes that donors should focus on some simple policy outcomes (ex post) instead of extensive policy conditions (ex ante).