The Economic Cost of Exclusion of LGBT People

M. V. Lee Badgett is a professor of economics and the former director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a Williams Distinguished Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute. 

In this ADB seminar, she shared insights on the implications of excluding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in economic development. She highlighted the negative effects of such exclusion at the individual and economic levels and cited the positive correlation of promoting transgender rights to improved Gross Domestic Product.