The idea that sexism can have negative consequences within workplaces and specific areas of public life is well-established. But how sexist attitudes on the part of individuals can operate in the aggregate at the societal level — their national economic and social consequences — has not been well documented.
A growing body of academic literature has been assessing how effective foreign aid is in an average country, as well as the conditions that allow such aid to have its intended impact and spur development. Called “conditional aid effectiveness,” this research has in the past focused on factors such as geographic location and the size of a country’s local elite, and examined how such variables are associated with foreign aid’s impact on economic growth.
Economists studying rural Africa have found that as income-generating activities shift from agriculture to more diverse types of employment in other sectors, personal income and national economic indicators rise. Few large-scale studies, however, have tested this finding.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the disparity in per capita income between the richest and poorest nations has increased many times over, and the economic leaders of the prior agricultural era did not necessarily become powerhouses in the next chapter in global development. What caused this great transformation of the world income distribution?
Studies by sociologists and psychologists have often shown little correlation between self-reported levels of happiness and income. A 2011 World Bank study highlights the “paradox of unhappy growth,” whereby life expectations rise with incomes, reducing the happiness that increased prosperity may have otherwise brought about.
