Due to the pandemic and other calamities, many have called 2020 the “Bible year”. Now, however, it looks like we are in a “biblical decade”. Between the floods in Western Europe, the forest fires in Greece and Turkey and the Delta and Mu variants of Covid-19, our planet and our way of life are under increasing pressure.

Yet nothing this year can compare to the tragedy in Afghanistan. 19 million women. As those of us in advanced economies contemplate the excesses of our modern society, Afghan women face an acute threat of being plunged back into the Dark Ages. The international media have duly highlighted the risks, with many media reminding us of the oppression women suffered under the Taliban between 1996 and 2001.

The Taliban responded with reassurance that women’s rights – especially their rights to work and to receive an education – will be respected as long as they are compatible with the values ​​of an Islamic society under Sharia law. The next few months will show whether this promise will be kept.

One can only hope that the new Afghan leaders will stay true to their word and resist the backward forces in their ranks. It would be a smart strategy, not only because it would allow them to acquire the much-needed goodwill from the international community, but also because it would be good economic policy. A society that oppresses women is a society that negates its prospects for growth and development.

A growing body of research has shown that promoting gender equality benefits not only women, but the economy as well. An influential year 2019 paper in Econometrics, one of the leading economic journals, shows that closing gender gaps at work and other distortions has contributed to a more efficient allocation of talent and has generated considerable productivity and well-being gains in states. United. The authors attribute a remarkable 20-40% growth in overall market output per person between 1960 and 2010 to improved talent allocation.

Eliminating gender and other forms of discrimination could likely generate even greater gains in developing countries, many of which have severe poor resource allocations and low productivity. In a recent paper, Gaurav Chiplunkar, University of Virginia, and I have found that removing barriers to female entrepreneurship alone can produce huge aggregate productivity gains in India. The benefits would likely be much greater if gender equality were extended to all aspects of economic activity.

Clearly, an economy has a much better chance of achieving its full potential when half of its population is not compelled to deploy its skills and talents. Like Christine Lagarde and Jonathan D Ostry, of the International Monetary Fund, argued in 2018, excluding women from economic activity prevents a country from benefiting from the complementarities between male and female labor.

Even before the recent regime change in Kabul, the outlook for women in Afghanistan was bleak. An indication came from the World Bank report Women, Business and the Law (WBL), which measures the degree of legal discrimination based on sex as it affects women’s economic opportunities.

A score of 100 indicates complete equality (under the law) between men and women; a score of zero indicates that women have none of the rights accorded to men. In 2020, Afghanistan’s WBL score was 38.1, compared to a global average score of 76.1 and a South Asian regional average score of 63.7.

The World Bank bases its WBL scores on information gathered from interviews with legal experts in each country. It covers several topics including constraints related to mobility, workplace treatment, compensation, marriage, parenthood, assets, entrepreneurship and pensions.

But it only covers existing laws, not their implementation, and it does not cover cultural and social gender norms that play an equally important role in many countries. Nonetheless, the comparison of WBL scores between countries is revealing.

Afghanistan’s score of 38.1 in 2020 means women faced severe legal restrictions in almost every category covered by the index even before the Taliban returned. For example, women were still not allowed to leave their homes or choose where to live in the same way as men.

But that doesn’t mean the country hasn’t made any progress in the 20 years since the Taliban last took power. Despite the enormous political challenges it faces, women’s rights have been extended in some important areas. A 2015 law, for example, allowed women to apply for a passport in the same way as men, giving them more mobility.

In a recent joint job, I argue that while Sharia law imposes certain constraints on women, it is not necessarily incompatible with making progress on legal equality between the sexes. Several authors have argued that it is patriarchal culture, and not Islamic law, that often lurks behind gender inequalities.

Here, Tunisia serves as good example how gender equality in the family sphere can be mainstreamed within the boundaries of Sharia law. In 2020, the country received a WBL score of 67.5, remarkably above the Middle East and North Africa regional average of 51.5.

Hopefully the Taliban won’t reverse the small gains of the past 20 years. If they honor their new commitments, they will gain some measure of international goodwill and improve Afghanistan’s economic development prospects.

For its part, the international community must continue to exert diplomatic, political and economic pressure to ensure that the country’s women are not once again abandoned to a miserable fate. – © Project unionPinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, former chief economist of the World Bank Group and editor of the American Economic Review, is professor of economics at Yale University