There is a fairly active group of scholars here (at Worcester Polytechnic Institute--WPI, a far more compelling place than its name suggests, maybe more on that later, more than likely not) that are interested in questions of international development. WPI has a very unusual, and very excellent plan that strongly encourages students to go overseas to learn about science, engineering, and social science outside of the classroom. You can read more about this here: https://www.wpi.edu/academics/catalogs/ugrad/wpiplan.html. But I have just digressed too much.
This group of folks at WPI meet periodically to discuss various topics, often (as far as I understand it) based on a newish publication. I went to my first meeting this week (this after a stupefying meeting with my retirement account adviser--I will never force you to hear the details of that) and we discussed a recently published article in Third World Quarterly written by Jason Hickel entitled "The 'girl effect': liberalism, empowerment and the contradictions of development" (here is a link to the article online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2014.946250#.VGbd5vnF98M). The article has merits and demerits and I don't plan on discussing them in this post, read it and draw your own conclusions. But the core goal of the paper is to critically assess "the girl effect (ge from here on out)" in economic development thinking, especially at the level of the World Bank, USAID, DFID, etc. If you don't know what the girl effect is don't worry. I didn't either. Essentially, the GE argues that development efforts should pay special attention to girls and young women and provide them with economic opportunities. It is thought that if women have income and economic power many birds will be killed with a single stone--population growth limits, democracy expansion, sexual violence prevention, dietary needs, etc. You get the picture. Dr. Hickel has plenty of reasons to be critical of these programs and for the most part they make good sense. But one thing that I think needs to be highlighted is the intellectual genealogy of the GE. It stems essentially from the findings that the most economically advanced societies (i.e. those in control, the North Atlantic powers and honorary members like Japan) have low birth rates, high educational attainment by women, high female employment rates, etc. The correlation is right but stops there. What these programs fail to recognize is that those great things that women are able to do in richer places is most likely not the cause, but the effect of wealth. Delayed childbirth, female educational attainment, etc. are the result of wealth, and eventually contribute to its creation. The GE puts the cart in front of the horse by expanding youg women's employment and may in fact challenge household welfare by eliminating other sources of income as new, and very cheap labor is introduced to the market.
Critiques of development are fun, and easy to make. But like Fransisco Toro reminds us (http://boringdevelopment.com/) the very basic goal of programs need to focus on wealth creation if they are to succeed. The GE is great, but without overall wealth increases will most likely fade into the background like countless other examples of catchy, and shallow development efforts.
