1. We are grateful to John Fox and John Myles for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
2. This paper is the result of a project undertaken by a select group of Introductory Sociology students at the University of Toronto, 2002–03, under the direction of their instructor, Robert Brym.
3. All sums are in U.S. dollars.
4. PRSPs still consider curative health care and secondary and tertiary education largely private goods.
5. In South Korea, Taiwan and the other “ Asian Tigers,” liberalization had positive effects on growth and the reduction of poverty. Significantly, however, in such cases liberalization was implemented after protectionist and supportive industrial trade policies had nurtured the domestic economy and made it competitive on the world market. In the great majority of less developed countries, liberalization has been triggered by the absence of competitive industries. Therefore, the consequences for the poor have been negative. Among the latter countries, an entirely different form of intervention — massive debt relief and the elimination of agricultural trade barriers in the rich countries — could improve access of the poor to productive resources. That, however, is not the focus of World Bank policy (Mutume, 2003; UNCTAD, 2002: 6– 9, 35– 6).
6. We focus on these four indicators of gender inequality because they are commonly used by researchers, focus on a variety of institutions, and vary widely across countries.
7. Data are from Central Intelligence Agency (2002) and “ Statistics by Country” (2003).
