Emerging Europe and Central Asia -
Opportunities for men and women

Europe and Central Asia have suffered a
setback in economic growth because of the recent global
crisis, which revealed fundamental structural weaknesses
previously hidden by the prosperity before the crisis. The
major weaknesses are the large savings deficits, the lagging
reforms in the social sectors, and the deterioration in
competitiveness. Policies can address these weaknesses by
taking into account the role of the behavior of firms,
public spending on health and education, the consequences of
demographic pressures, particularly on pension systems, and
the bottlenecks created by skilled labor force shortages.
This report reviews the performance of women and men during
the past decade in three spheres: human capital, labor
markets, and entrepreneurship. Similar to World Development
Report 2012 (World Bank 2011a), it looks at the dimensions
of endowments and economic opportunities. However, it does
not cover issues related to agency, that is, the ability of
actors to make independent choices and exercise control over
their own actions. The data are analyzed to determine
whether women and men are performing well compared with each
other, but also how they fare in a global context. The
analysis is primarily quantitative and mines various data
sets. This is strength of the report because a quantitative
analysis can add value by providing some measure of the
degree of differences in the outcomes observed. Yet, it is a
weakness as well because the outcomes are measured, but not
always explained. Consequently, more work is needed in this
area, especially qualitative analysis that is followed up by
targeted quantitative surveys.