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IntroductionThe recent referendum in the UK on membership of the EU has sent shockwaves across the political establishment not just in the UK itself and throughout Europe, but also around the world. In the runup to the referendum, economists were (perhaps for the first time) united in pointing out that the economic case for Brexit is rather slim, that hardly any well-argued reason could be given by the Brexit camp as to why it may be a good idea to leave the EU, and that the economic consequences could be severe. That lack of economic argument in favour of Brexit, which should have been the key battleground in the run up to the referendum, led the debate to focus on one particular issue, Immigration. Like the free movement of goods, capital, and services, a fundamental pillar of the EU, and a non-negotiable requirement for any new member state, is the free movement of people. It is that particular aspect of EU membership that became the strongest single assertion of the Brexit camp. The inability to control immigration from within the EU was made a symbol for everything else Brexit stood for (such as the idea of "sovereignty" or the pain of being subjugated to "rules made in Brussels and not the UK"), butagainfact-based arguments against free mobility on economic or welfare grounds were hard to find. Nevertheless, free mobility within the EU became quickly the scapegoat for the economic and social woes that had distressed the country since the great recession, and perhaps even earlier, such as crime, real wage decline, inequality, unemployment, access to social services, health provision, and benefits and transfers."Immigration" and everything people associated with it and were encouraged to believe by a relentless campaign of the majority of the tabloid press decisively contributed to the decision that the UK took on June 23, 2016. Immigration and free mobility will likely again be central in the negotiations between the UK and its European partners in developing a model for Brexit that minimises the economic costs for both the UK and the EU.

This paper investigates the effect of the differential pecuniary costs of sons and daughters on fertility decisions. The focus is on dowries in India, which increase the economic returns to sons and decrease the returns to daughters. The paper exploits an exogenous shift in the cost of girls relative to boys arising from a revision in anti-dowry law, which is shown to have decreased dowry transfers markedly. The reform is found to have attenuated the widely documented positive association between daughters and their parents' fertility. The effect is particularly pronounced for more autonomous women and for individuals living in areas characterised by strong preferences for sons.

BackgroundGender issues remain a neglected area in most approaches to health workforce policy, planning and research. There is an accumulating body of evidence on gender differences in health workers' employment patterns and pay, but inequalities in access to non-pecuniary benefits between men and women have received little attention. This study investigates empirically whether gender differences can be observed in health workers' access to non-pecuniary benefits across six low- and middle-income countries.MethodsThe analysis draws on cross-nationally comparable data from health facility surveys conducted in Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Jamaica, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Probit regression models are used to investigate whether female and male physicians, nurses and midwives enjoy the same access to housing allowance, paid vacations, in-service training and other benefits, controlling for other individual and facility-level characteristics.ResultsWhile the analysis did not uncover any consistent pattern of gender imbalance in access to non-monetary benefits, some important differences were revealed. Notably, female nursing and midwifery personnel (the majority of the sample) are found significantly less likely than their male counterparts to have accessed in-service training, identified not only as an incentive to attract and retain workers but also essential for strengthening workforce quality.ConclusionThis study sought to mainstream gender considerations by exploring and documenting sex differences in selected employment indicators across health labour markets. Strengthening the global evidence base about the extent to which gender is independently associated with health workforce performance requires improved generation and dissemination of sex-disaggregated data and research with particular attention to gender dimensions.