New episode of the EBRD podcast available for download
The latest episode of the Pocket Economics podcast looks at family empowerment, asking what role families play in modern economies.
Oriana Bandiera, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics (LSE) and an expert on poverty reduction, inclusion and labour policies, argues that ‘empowering families’ means removing the constraints that might keep women and children out of education and the labour market.
Reducing the number of constraints improves the allocation of talent and can bring enormous gains, she says.
“We are missing out the importance of allocation and how many resources we waste by keeping women at home,” she tells Jonathan Charles, EBRD Managing Director, Communications.
“We say that there is always a great woman behind a great man, but we can also put it the other way round: there is always a great man behind every great woman.”
Social norms play a key role here and cannot be changed by government policies, she says. But she emphasises that “policies can remove constraints” and thus contribute to empowering families.