Europe and Central Asia have suffered asetback in economic growth because of the recent globalcrisis, which revealed fundamental structural weaknessespreviously hidden by the prosperity before the crisis. Themajor weaknesses are the large savings deficits, the laggingreforms in the social sectors, and the deterioration incompetitiveness. Policies can address these weaknesses bytaking into account the role of the behavior of firms,public spending on health and education, the consequences ofdemographic pressures, particularly on pension systems, andthe bottlenecks created by skilled labor force shortages.This report reviews the performance of women and men duringthe past decade in three spheres: human capital, labormarkets, and entrepreneurship. Similar to World DevelopmentReport 2012 (World Bank 2011a), it looks at the dimensionsof endowments and economic opportunities. However, it doesnot cover issues related to agency, that is, the ability ofactors to make independent choices and exercise control overtheir own actions. The data are analyzed to determinewhether women and men are performing well compared with eachother, but also how they fare in a global context. Theanalysis is primarily quantitative and mines various datasets. This is strength of the report because a quantitativeanalysis can add value by providing some measure of thedegree of differences in the outcomes observed. Yet, it is aweakness as well because the outcomes are measured, but notalways explained. Consequently, more work is needed in thisarea, especially qualitative analysis that is followed up bytargeted quantitative surveys.
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