Tackling Legal Impediments to Women’s Economic Empowerment

Overcoming Legal Impediments to Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment.

The Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST), otherwise known as the POLST paradigm, represents the next generation in end-of-life (EOL) planning for certain patients who wish to exercise prospective control over their own medical treatment in their final days. As is true for any physician treatment orders, a POLST is written in consultation with the patient or patient's surrogate...

Structural Impediments to Economic Globalization in the Middle East

T here has been a basic tension between the stated objectives of Middle Eastern leaders to integrate their countries into the world economy, on the one hand, and the actual, tangible levels of this integration, on the other. Consequently, the non-democratic states of the Middle East have consistently lagged behind in such globalization indices as foreign direct investment (FDI), competitiveness...

Economic Empowerment of Women

Allies unknown: Social accountability and legal empowerment.

This essay suggests that two strands of social action which have hitherto developed separately - legal empowerment and social accountability - ought to learn from one another. Legal empowerment efforts grow out of the tradition of legal aid for the poor; they assist citizens in seeking remedies to breaches of rights. Social accountability interventions employ information and participation to de...

Women Empowerment and Economic Development

T persistence of gender inequality is most starkly brought home in the phenomenon of “missing women.” The term was coined by Amartya Sen in a now classic article in the New York Review of Books (Sen 1990) to capture the fact that the proportion of women is lower than what would be expected if girls and women throughout the developing world were born and died at the same rate, relative to boys a...