fbpx
01 / 05
Give Women the Freedom to Fix Poverty

Blog Post | Wealth & Poverty

Give Women the Freedom to Fix Poverty

Even today, there remain 18 countries where husbands can deny their wife the right to work.

A bizarre column in Australia’s Daily Telegraph last month argued that it should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mom. The piece was met with ridicule, and rightly so. Women should be free to make their own choices about family and career. Fortunately, no country actually bans a woman’s choice to be a homemaker. Unfortunately, in much of the world, a woman’s options to work outside the home are severely limited by government meddling. 

One of the more frightening revelations in the UN’s recent Human Development Report concerns the state of women’s economic freedom around the world. In 100 countries the government forbids women from working in some professions. Argentinian women are barred from running distilleries, Russian women from becoming woodworkers or freight train conductors, and Emirati women from “managing and monitoring mechanical machines”. 

For too many women around the world, economic freedom is a distant dream. Countries should adopt policies of economic freedom not only because women everywhere are capable of making their own choices, but because adopting such policies is a proven road out of poverty

Consider Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries. Before the turn of the millennium, Ethiopian women lacked fundamental economic freedoms, including equal property rights and the freedom to seek paid employment. Husbands could maintain sole control over joint property and deny their wives permission to work outside the home.

One Ethiopian man who emigrated to the United States lamented the loss of that power: 

My wife and I came here together, but after a few short years my wife’s ideas and behaviours began to change … She discovered she could have her own job and money. That was something she could not do in Ethiopia. She then went out and got a job and earned money for herself. This new job and money gave her ideas about more freedom and more independence. She then decided to manage her own money, buy her own car, buy her own clothing and other items she wanted – like American women do. She became so independent that I could no longer control her.

In 2000, a revision to Ethiopia’s family code law granted wives equal authority to conjointly administer common marital property and enshrined the right to work outside the home without spousal permission. The legal revision was rolled out in some regions and cities before others, allowing researchers to examine the law’s effect. 

The early adopters of increased economic freedom for women saw women’s labour market participation rise. More women engaged in paid work and work with higher education requirements, as well as year-round employment. “In other words, the representation of women increased in occupations that are likely to have higher returns,” the study concluded. The change was most dramatic among young, single women whose life expectations and household dynamics had not yet been set. 

Wife-beating, unfortunately, is still a “pervasive social problem”, and in rural areas women’s economic freedoms are sometimes ignored. Over 70 per cent of Ethiopia’s women have personally suffered domestic violence at some point in their lives, according to one survey taken five years after the legal revision. An overview of 10 such studies found that lifetime prevalence of domestic violence against women ranged from 20 to 78 per cent in Ethiopia.

Unlike Ethiopian immigrants to the United States, it is clear that many women in Ethiopia still lack the ability to earn and manage money without interference. Still, the legal change is a step in the right direction. 

Even today, there remain 18 countries where husbands can legally deny their wives permission to work. They are Bahrain, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Congo (Kinshasa), Gabon, Guinea, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Mauritania, Niger, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen. Perhaps their governments fear that economic freedom might give women “ideas about more freedom and more independence”. It’s time that women everywhere were free to make their own choices on whether to work in or outside the home.

This article first appeared in CapX.

World Bank | Economic Growth

Developing Countries Have Seen Sustained Growth Since 1987

“Since the late 1980s, the classification of countries into income categories has transformed. The number of low-income countries has steadily declined, while the number of high-income countries has increased.

This shift reflects broader global economic developments, including sustained growth in many developing countries, greater integration into the global economy, and the effects of policy reforms and international organizations’ support. In 1987, 30% of reporting countries were classified as low-income and 25% as high-income countries. By 2024, these ratios shifted to 12% low-income and 40% high-income.”

From World Bank.

Blog Post | Population Growth

No, Prosperity Doesn’t Cause Population Collapse

Wealth doesn’t have to mean demographic decline.

Summary: For decades, experts assumed that rising prosperity inevitably led to falling birth rates, fueling concerns about population collapse in wealthy societies. But new data show that this link is weakening or even reversing, with many high-income countries now seeing higher fertility than some middle-income nations. As research reveals that wealth and fertility can rise together, policymakers have an opportunity to rethink outdated assumptions about tradeoffs between prosperity and demographic decline.


For years, it was treated as a demographic law: as countries grow wealthier, they have fewer children. Prosperity, it was believed, inevitably drove birth rates down. This assumption shaped countless forecasts about the future of the global population.

And in many wealthy countries, such as South Korea and Italy, very low fertility rates persist. But a growing body of research is challenging the idea that rising prosperity always suppresses fertility.

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently observed that middle-income countries are now experiencing lower total fertility rates than many advanced economies ever have. His latest work shows that Thailand and Colombia each have fertility rates around 1.0 births per woman, which is even lower than rates in well-known low-fertility advanced economies such as Japan, Spain and Italy.

“My conjecture is that by 2060 or so, we might see rich economies as a group with higher [total fertility rates] than emerging economies,” Fernández-Villaverde predicts.

This changing relationship between prosperity and fertility is already apparent in Europe. For many years, wealthier European countries tended to have lower birth rates than poorer ones. That pattern weakened around 2017, and by 2021 it had flipped.

This change fits a broader historical pattern. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealthier families generally had more children. The idea that prosperity leads to smaller families is a modern development. Now, in many advanced economies, that trend is weakening or reversing. The way that prosperity influences fertility is changing yet again. Wealth and family size are no longer pulling in opposite directions.

This shift also calls into question long-standing assumptions about women’s income and fertility. For years, many economists thought that higher salaries discouraged women from having children by raising the opportunity cost of taking time off work. That no longer seems to hold in many countries.

In several high-income nations, rising female earnings are now associated with higher fertility. Studies in Italy and the Netherlands show that couples where both partners earn well are more likely to have children, while low-income couples are the least likely to do so. Similar findings have emerged from Sweden as well. In Norway, too, higher-earning women now tend to have more babies.

This trend is not limited to Europe. In the United States, richer families are also beginning to have more babies than poorer ones, reversing patterns observed in previous decades. A study of seven countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia — found that in every case, higher incomes for both men and women increased the chances of having a child.

This growing body of evidence challenges the assumption that prosperity causes people to have fewer children. 

Still, birth rates are falling across much of the world, with many countries now below replacement level. While this trend raises serious concerns, such as the risk of an aging and less innovative population and widening gaps in public pension solvency, it is heartening that it is not driven by prosperity itself. Wealth does not automatically lead to fewer children, and theories blaming consumerism or rising living standards no longer hold up.

Although the recent shift in the relationship between prosperity and fertility is welcome, it is not yet enough to raise fertility to the replacement rate of around 2.1 children per woman — a challenging threshold to reach.

But the growing number of policymakers around the world concerned about falling fertility can consider many simple, freedom-enhancing reforms that lower barriers to raising a family, including reforms to education, housing and childcare. Still, it’s important to challenge the common assumption that prosperity inevitably leads to lower birth rates: Wealth does not always mean fewer children.

This article was published at The Hill on 6/16/2025.

Axios | Wealth & Poverty

Being a Millionaire Is Kind of Middle Class Now

“The number of ‘everyday’ millionaires — those with wealth between $1 million and $5 million — is soaring…

There were nearly 52 million ‘everyday’ millionaires in the world last year, per a recent report from UBS. That’s four times the number in 2000.

Even accounting for inflation, the number of everyday millionaires in 2024 was 2.5 times what it was in 2000. The wealth manager does not break down how many of these folks live in the U.S. But America has, by far, more millionaires than any other country in the world.

New American millionaires were minted at a rate of about 1,000 a day last year. There are nearly 24 million millionaires in the U.S., 40% of the global total, and about four times the number than runner-up China.”

From Axios.

World Bank | Quality of Government

Côte D’Ivoire’s Land Reforms Are Unlocking Jobs and Growth

“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.

When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…

Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).

This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”

From World Bank.