Legal Barriers to Economic Participation

Friday, October 23 &
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
A woman street vendor who sells drinks and food walks on the street in Jakarta September 1, 2015. REUTERS/Beawiharta
Speaker
Sarah Iqbal

Program Coordinator, Women, Business and the Law Project, World Bank Group 

Presider
Rachel B. Vogelstein

Senior Fellow and Director, Women and Foreign Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations

This roundtable discussion “Legal Barriers to Economic Participation” with Sarah Iqbal, director of the World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law project, highlights findings from the World Bank’s fourth edition of the global Women, Business and the Law report series.

The report measures how laws, regulations, and institutions differentiate between women and men in ways that affect women’s incentives or capacity to work or to set up and run a business. It provides data on legal and regulatory barriers to women’s entrepreneurship and employment in 173 economies.

Top Stories on CFR

Russia

Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at CFR, and Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at CFR, sit down with James M. Lindsay to discuss the future of U.S. policy toward Russia and the risks posed by heightened tensions between two nuclear powers. This episode is the first in a special TPI series on the U.S. 2024 presidential election and is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Terrorism and Counterterrorism

Violence around U.S. elections in 2024 could not only destabilize American democracy but also embolden autocrats across the world. Jacob Ware recommends that political leaders take steps to shore up civic trust and remove the opportunity for violence ahead of the 2024 election season.

China

Those seeking to profit from fentanyl and governments seeking to control its supply are locked in a never-ending competition, with each new countermeasure spurring further innovation to circumvent it.