Protecting Women's Income Security in Old Age: Toward Gender-Responsive Pension Systems

This brief synthesizes research findings, analysis and policy recommendations on transforming pension systems to reduce gender gaps and protect women's income security in old age.Ageing has a female face. Women not only live longer than men but are also less likely to enjoy income security and economic independence in old age. Because of a lifetime of economic disadvantage, older women end up with lower incomes and less access to land, housing and other assets that would help them maintain an adequate standard of living. In addition, pension systems grossly fail to produce equal outcomes for women. In most countries, women are less likely than men to receive a pension at all, or they have lower benefits.Gendered labour market and life course patterns lie at the roots of women's disadvantage in old age, but their impact can be magnified or mitigated by specific features of pension system design. This brief takes a closer look at these features and shows how pension systems can be transformed to reduce gender gaps and protect women's income security in old age.This brief draws on key findings of UN Women's flagship report "Progress of the World's Women 2015 - 2016.

Gender Equality, Child Development and Job Creation: How to Reap the 'Triple Dividend' From Early Childhood Education and Care Services

This brief synthesizes research findings, analysis and policy recommendations for realizing the triple dividend from early childhood education and care (ECEC) services.ECEC services have come to occupy an important place on the global policy agenda. While some developed countries have long invested in this area, a growing number of developing countries are following suit. As those who carry out the bulk of childcare -- as unpaid caregivers as well as service providers in day-care and preschool institutions -- women have a huge stake in this issue. However, the implications for women, as mothers or childcare workers, have been insufficiently reflected in the work of international organizations and many national-level policies that tend to focus mainly on children.Well-designed investments in ECEC services can have major economic and social pay-offs for families, individuals and societies at large by: (a) facilitating women's labour force participation, (b) enhancing children's capabilities and (c) creating decent jobs in the paid care sector. But this triple dividend is not automatic. It needs to be built into service design and delivery.This brief discusses different mechanisms for financing, delivering and regulating ECEC services and highlights promising avenues for realizing the triple dividend. It argues that the key is high-quality childcare that is available, affordable, accessible and compatible with the needs of working parents. This brief draws on key findings of UN Women's flagship report, "Progress of the World's Women 2015 - 2016.

GLR-Parsing of Word Lattices Using a Beam Search Method

This paper presents an approach that allows the efficient integration of speech recognition and language understanding using Tomita's generalized LR-parsing algorithm. For this purpose the GLRP-algorithm is revised so that an agenda mechanism can be used to control the flow of computation of the parsing process. This new approach is used to integrate speech recognition and speech understanding incrementally with a beam search method. These considerations have been implemented and tested on ten word lattices.Comment: 4 pages, 61K postscript, compressed, uuencoded, Eurospeech 9/95, Madri

Making National Social Protection Floors Work for Women

This brief synthesizes research findings, analysis and policy recommendations on making social protection floors work for women. The idea of a social protection floor (SPF) is now firmly established on the global development agenda. Defined as a set of minimum guarantees, including basic income security for children, working-age adults, older people and people with disabilities, as well as essential health care for all, SPFs hold promise for women, who are over-represented among those excluded from existing social protection schemes. To date, however, the integration of gender concerns in social protection has been uneven and ambiguous, with women's specific risks and constraints not addressed.Drawing on cross-country evidence and experiences, this brief highlights promising ways to make SPFs work for women. Much can be done in terms of integrating gender into the design and implementation of programmes that promote income security across the life cycle, including cash transfers, public works programmes, and pensions. To provide long-term solutions, however, these efforts must be part of a broader package, including policies that enable women to access decent work -- which remains the main source of income for most working-age adults and their families.This brief draws on key findings of UN Women's flagship report "Progress of the World's Women 2015 -- 2016.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE SECTOR RELATIONSHIPS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

This paper refutes the conventional wisdom, bolstered in the wake of the Asian financial crisis that governments should not become too friendly with the private sector but, instead, should remain neutral and at arms-length distance. The empirical findings presented here indicate that countries in which governments have forged close and cooperative working relationships with the private sector have had much greater economic success. Furthermore, countries with more business-friendly public-private sector relationships tend to exhibit greater positive responsiveness to pro-growth policy reforms. In many developing countries today, where public-private sector relationships are characterized more by mistrust than cooperation, more not less collaboration is needed to spur economic growth. The art of governance, however, is avoiding state capture and not letting this partnership degenerate into favoritism and cronyism.Public-Private Sector Relationships, Governance

Social Web Communities

Blogs, Wikis, and Social Bookmark Tools have rapidly emerged on the Web. The reasons for their immediate success are that people are happy to share information, and that these tools provide an infrastructure for doing so without requiring any specific skills. At the moment, there exists no foundational research for these systems, and they provide only very simple structures for organising knowledge. Individual users create their own structures, but these can currently not be exploited for knowledge sharing. The objective of the seminar was to provide theoretical foundations for upcoming Web 2.0 applications and to investigate further applications that go beyond bookmark- and file-sharing. The main research question can be summarized as follows: How will current and emerging resource sharing systems support users to leverage more knowledge and power from the information they share on Web 2.0 applications? Research areas like Semantic Web, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Library and Information Sciences, and Hypermedia Systems have been working for a while on these questions. In the workshop, researchers from these areas came together to assess the state of the art and to set up a road map describing the next steps towards the next generation of social software

Social Web Communities

Blogs, Wikis, and Social Bookmark Tools have rapidly emerged onthe Web. The reasons for their immediate success are that people are happy to share information, and that these tools provide an infrastructure for doing so without requiring any specific skills. At the moment, there exists no foundational research for these systems, and they provide only very simple structures for organising knowledge. Individual users create their own structures, but these can currently not be exploited for knowledge sharing. The objective of the seminar was to provide theoretical foundations for upcoming Web 2.0 applications and to investigate further applications that go beyond bookmark- and file-sharing. The main research question can be summarized as follows: How will current and emerging resource sharing systems support users to leverage more knowledge and power from the information they share on Web 2.0 applications? Research areas like Semantic Web, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Library and Information Sciences, and Hypermedia Systems have been working for a while on these questions. In the workshop, researchers from these areas came together to assess the state of the art and to set up a road map describing the next steps towards the next generation of social software