Motivation: In most families around the world, women are children's primary caregivers. An improvement in women's status, besides being vital in its own right, has significant positive externalities since the welfare of children has consequences for long-term economic growth and development. Research question: Could enabling women to have greater opportunities to be productive members of society have a positive relationship with child welfare? Approach and methods: We examine the relationship between women's and children's well-being for a group of developing countries. We first study this in the context of the overall sample, and then in various country groupings, based on per capita income, geography and religion. A descriptive comparative study and a regression analysis are conducted. Findings and conclusions: We find that women's enhanced well-being is strongly related to improved child welfare. Although there is a wide variation in women's well-being within and across various income, geographic and religious groups, our results are robust across and within all groups. In the regression analysis, the only variable that is consistently significant in influencing outcomes for children is our measure of women's well-being. We cannot reach a clear conclusion regarding the influence of geography, religion and even gross domestic product per capita on child outcomes. Policy implications: It seems imperative for women's empowerment to be a part of every development agenda; a priority in itself, rather than something that should trickle down with overall development. An improvement in women's status, besides being vital in its own right, has significant positive externalities since children's welfare has consequences for long-term economic growth and development. In our study, it is the single most important factor with a definite impact on children's welfare.

Using the theoretical framework of a simple general equilibrium model, this paper examines whether strategies aimed at protecting or promoting manufacturing industries indirectly taxed the agricultural and service sectors. A panel data set consisting of five South Asian countries over a 26 year time period is employed in the analysis. Three different estimation procedures are used to account for factors that are country specific and those that are common to all countries. The results indicate that the agricultural sector indirectly felt the brunt of the net protection provided to manufactures due to the 'shifting of protection' across sectors. The service sector, on the other hand, indirectly benefited from the general equilibrium spillover effects.

This article examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and child well-being in Nepal. Various indicators of women’s empowerment and child well-being are presented and compared across the seven provinces in the country. A strong positive relationship between the two is established. In fact, women’s empowerment appears to have a stronger relationship to children’s well-being than wealth indicators.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to devise a new index of wellbeing that includes social and political in addition to economic factors. The new index seeks to assess a country's underlying "enabling environment" -the extent to which individuals are able to live as each chooses. Country rankings using this new measure (the HENX) are compared with the ranking of countries using the UN's popular indicators of development, the human development index and the HPI-2. Design/methodology/approach -The paper describes the necessity of a new index, the subcomponents used in its construction, and the method of construction. Findings -Country rankings are sensitive to which measure is used for the ranking. In particular, the USA and UK fare poorly when ranked by the HPI-2 but their rankings improve dramatically when the HENX is used. Originality/value -If a measure of the enabling environment of a country is deemed to be important as a measure of the wellbeing of citizens, and if political and social dimensions are deemed to be important to this environment, rankings of the most developed economies by the UN fail to adequately capture the countries' relative positions.

This paper provides new insights in understanding the adjustments of the labor market to trade liberalization policies in an economy producing tradeables and nontradeables. The results of the paper indicate that the short-run effects of trade liberalization on wages, labor allocation and worker welfare is contingent on certain explicit production and demand conditions that exist in an economy. The production condition is related to the slope of the labor demand curve in a given economy and the demand condition is related to the difference in the cross-price elasticity of demand of nontradeables to the price of importables and exportables. The necessary combination of these conditions needed for trade liberalization to be welfare improving in the short run is explored. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2005F16,