The persisting inequalities women face while entering the labor market, make female economic empowerment a major policy objective for international organisations, local governments, non-profit organisations, researchers, and private companies. However, female economic empowerment should not only tackle those inequalities itself but it is also considered a key element to end poverty and boost economic prosperity. The 17th PEGNet Policy Brief  examines this connection between female economic empowerment and development.

Efficient provision of electricity requires timely expansions of power transmission capacity. However, regulation does not always send the right signals to generate the required (and timely) investments. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the effect of alternative regulations on investment on transmission capacity. In this paper, considering regulated remuneration, we perform this evaluation with a behavioral simulation model of the transmission capacity expansion, in which capacity is endogenously determined by the demand/supply relation.

Applications of lab experiments to real-world phenomena are limited. We fill the gap by examining how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab reflect microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda – a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal setup. We use the standard Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) experimental design in addition to a unique dataset from off-grid microenterprises, managed by entrepreneurs who have been working in mixed and single-sex teams since 2016.

In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004, and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields.