Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: Evidence from Industry-Level Data

Download or read book Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: Evidence from Industry-Level Data written by Ata Can Bertay and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-07-03 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study whether higher gender equality facilitates economic growth by enabling better allocation of a valuable resource: female labor. By allocating female labor to its more productive use, we hypothesize that reducing gender inequality should disproportionately benefit industries with typically higher female share in their employment relative to other industries. Specifically, we exploit within-country variation across industries to test whether those that typically employ more women grow relatively faster in countries with ex-ante lower gender inequality. The test allows us to identify the causal effect of gender inequality on industry growth in value-added and labor productivity. Our findings show that gender inequality affects real economic outcomes.