Gender Equality and Economic Growth: Is it Equality of Opportunity or Equality of Outcomes?

This article explores the impact of gender equality on economic growth. In particular, we focus on the multidimensional nature of gender equality with the object of identifying the relative salience of different aspects of equality. Using exploratory factor analysis on five measures of gender equality, we identify two distinct dimensions: equality of economic opportunities and equality in economic and political outcomes. Regression analysis conducted on an unbalanced panel of 101 countries taken over nonoverlapping five-year periods from 1990 to 2000 reveals that a standard deviation improvement in equality in economic opportunity increases growth by 1.3 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in participatory equality improves growth by an average of about 1.2 percentage points. However, this impact is contingent on a country's stage of development: while developing economies experience significant improvements in growth from greater equality in opportunity, developed societies see significant improvements resulting from greater equality in outcomes.     

Gender,Distribution, and Balance of Payments Constrained Growth in Developing Countries

An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender equality on economic growth. Previous studies have found that the effect varies, depending on the measure of equality (wages or capabilities). This paper expands that discussion by considering both the short and long run, evaluating the effects of gender equality in two types of economies—semi-industrialized economies (SIEs) and low-income agricultural economies (LIAEs). Further, it incorporates gender effects on the balance of payments constraint to growth. The results suggest that gender wage and capabilities equality work in opposite directions in SIEs and in the same (positive) direction in LIAEs. In the long-run analysis, government macroeconomic management policies are shown to be necessary in order to ratify movements towards gender equality.     

Gender equality and economic growth in Brazil: A long-run analysis

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women’s time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks, and thus indirectly on access to infrastructure. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, a reduction in gender bias in the market place, and a composite pro-growth, pro-gender reform program. The analysis showed that fostering gender equality, which may partly depend on the externalities that infrastructure creates in terms of women’s time allocation and bargaining power, may have a substantial impact on long-run growth in Brazil.     

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Korea

Calibrating an endogenous‐growth model to Korean data, we analyse the impact of gender inequality in Korea on long‐term economic growth. We find that gender equality policies that lower discrimination in the labour market or that increase the time spent by a father on childrearing can contribute positively to female labour market participation and per capita income growth. The simulation results show that when the disparities between men and women at home and in the labour market are completely removed, the female labour force participation rate increases from 54.4 to 67.5%, and the growth rate in per capita income rises from 3.6 to 4.1% on average over a generation.     

Does a free media protect labour rights?

Based on a sample of 47 developing economies considered over the period 1992–2012, we find that a free media reduces the legal protection of labour, taken as a whole. However, the impact differs over various aspects of labour regulation: while media freedom correlates with less stringent regulation of work time, less constraints to dismissal, and lower protection of employee representation rights, it also correlates with greater legal parity of part-time and fixed-term labour with full-time and permanent workers.     

Separating the influence of capitalism and democracy on women's well-being

This empirical analysis seeks to determine which institutional arrangement, capitalism or democracy, tends to be more effective at improving women's well-being and promoting gender equality in society. Country-specific indexes measuring the degree of economic freedoms that exist within the market and the degree of political rights that exist within a democracy are used in a panel data analysis to explain the observed levels of various quality of life measures reflecting issues that are relevant to women. These empirical results indicate that capitalism often has a stronger beneficial impact on many aspects of women's well-being and gender equality in society.     

Risk tolerance,gender, and entrepreneurship: The Palestinian case

This paper analyzes the inter‐relationships between entrepreneurial propensity, fear of failure (FoF), and gender in Palestine, using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey (APS) data for 2009, 2010, and 2012, and it is the first that addresses Gender, fear of failure, and entrepreneurship for Palestine. The paper extends the analysis of the endogeneity issue of FoF by using the conditional mixed process (CMP), which improves the efficiency of the estimates. The results show that the fear of failure negatively affects entrepreneurial status, while skill perception does the opposite. It is also found that fear of failure is higher among women, although this result is not stable over time. Using the CMP specification, we find that gender and fear of failure both reduce the predicted probability of entrepreneurship consistently over time. The only variable that consistently predicts fear of failure and is significant is skill perception, which has a negative impact. Policy implications of this research point to the importance of reducing the gender gap in entrepreneurship. In particular, there is a need to improve their skill perception in order to encourage more females to be entrepreneurs. Networking, vocational education and media coverage of success stories are among the tools that could potentially achieve this result.     

Macroeconomic determinants of growth: new measurement and evidence on the effect of political freedom

Empirical results based on the re-examination of the data and models offered by Kormendi and Meguire (1985) and Gupta (1988) suggest that the impact of political freedom on economic growth is positive and significant. In particular, the replacement of their civil liberties variable by a new varible representing social capabilities improves the magnitude and significance of the estimated parameters and explanatory power of the regressions. The marginal contribution of social capabilities to explaining the percentage variations in the mean rate of income growth is the third highest among all determinants of growth, suggesting that the effect of freedom on growth is more pronounced than previously measured. It is argued that freedom will enable individuals to expand the range of socio-economic opportunities and to establish greater control over the human environment in order to improve material well-being.     

Do Educational Attainments Influence Attitudes Toward Gender Equality in Sub-Saharan Africa?

Abstract

Although there is a plethora of literature on gender equality and women empowerment, studies on whether (and to what extent) educational attainments affect people’s attitudes toward gender equality are lacking. This is particularly true for Africa, a mostly male-dominated continent. In this article, we use data from the Wave 6 of the World Values Survey to empirically examine the relationship between educational attainments and attitudes toward gender equality among people in 5 countries in Africa–Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Our results, based on different measures of gender equality and econometric specifications, consistently reveal that the higher the level of education acquired, the more liberal and favorable the individual’s attitudes are toward gender equality.     

Adult equivalence scales and food expenditures: an application to Mexican beef and pork purchases

In the analysis of food expenditures, the use of a simple count of household members as an estimate of household size implicitly assumes each household member has the same marginal impact. In this analysis of Mexican food expenditures, endogenously determined adult equivalence scales are estimated in such a way that these marginal impacts are allowed to vary by household member age and gender. The results of a series of hypothesis tests indicate a rejection of the implied null hypothesis of equal marginal expenditure impacts associated with the use of the traditional count based household size variable. This study also rejects the null hypothesis of the equality of adult equivalent scales across the commodities included in this analysis.     

How context matters: A survey based experiment on distributive justice

We explore distributive justice and perception of fairness using survey data from freshmen and senior students of economics and sociology. We analyse the impact of context and education on their preferences over a hypothetical distribution of resources between individuals which presents a trade off between efficiency and equality. With context giving minimal information, economics students are less likely to favour equality; studying economics influences the preferences of the subjects, increasing this difference. However, when the same problem is inserted into a meaningful context, the difference disappears. Four distribution mechanisms are analysed: egalitarianism, maximin, utilitarianism and utilitarianism with a floor constraint.     

Counting Care Work in Social Policy: Valuing Unpaid Child- and Eldercare in Korea

This study demonstrates the usefulness of quantifying and valuing time spent on unpaid care work and explores the links between social policies, unpaid care work, and gender equality in the context of recent social care reforms in the Republic of Korea. Using information provided by two nationally representative surveys, this article elaborates on the gendered organization of care provision and the total costs of care services for children and the elderly, including unpaid family care, family expenditures on care services, and state support in the form of public expenditures. The study finds that omitting the role of family care services overestimates the state's role in caring for children and elderly adults. A closer look at the impact of long-term care insurance reveals the need for integrated analyses of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the social organization of care, especially in regard to gender equality.     

Global distribution and dynamics of economic freedom: Non-parametric approach

The paper exploits the distributional dynamics and structural changes in the endogenous distribution of economic freedom across countries over time by utilizing the Rosenblatt–Parzen Kernel density estimator compared to the original distribution based on the methodology proposed by the Heritage Foundation. We utilize the distribution of economic freedom as a tool to identify which policies enhanced the overall level of economic freedom. We develop the distribution of endogenous economic freedom by decomposing effects of economic freedom on the level of income per capita in IV–2SLS estimation framework for a panel of 134 countries to identify the effect of institutions of economic freedom on the level of per capita income. Structural estimates indicate that improvements in the monetary, fiscal, and labor freedom exert the strongest direct effect on the level of economic freedom and indirect effect on the level of real income per capita. Our study demonstrates considerable differences between the original and endogenous distributional dynamics of economic freedom over time. In exploiting the non-parametric setting of endogenous economic freedom, we identify a recent emergence of twin-peak distribution across countries where developing nations have improved the level of economic freedom considerably compared to the initial year.     

THE INTERGENERATIONAL CORRELATION BETWEEN CHILDREN'S ADULT EARNINGS AND THEIR PARENTS' INCOME: RESULTS FROM THE MICHIGAN PANEL SURVEY OF INCOME DYNAMICS

Intergenerational correlations between parental income and child earnings reflect the extent of intergenerational economic mobility and equality of opportunity. Previous estimates are about 0.2, but these estimates suffer from a number of problems, including the use of but one year of observations and of nonrandom samples. We present new estimates based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. These estimates suggest correlations over 0.5 with longer-run income and earning measures, as well as some gender and race differences and some impact of liquidity constraints. They also suggest that the intergenerational elasticity is greater as parental income increases, the opposite of the Becker-Tomes conjecture.     

Measuring Socio-Economic GENDER Inequality: Toward an Alternative to the UNDP Gender-Related Development Index

This paper assesses the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Although the GDI has increased attention on gender equality in human development, it suffers from several limitations. A major problem is that it conflates relative gender equality with absolute levels of human development and thus gives no information on comparative gender inequality among countries. Using the same indicators as the GDI, the paper constructs a Relative Status of Women (RSW) index, which demonstrates how using a measure of gender equality that abstracts from levels of development results in very different country rankings. However, the RSW is not an ideal measure of gender inequality. The GDI indicators are not the most appropriate ones for measuring gender inequality and hence both the RSW and the GDI have limited validity. The paper concludes by offering a conceptual framework that provides the basis for an alternative measure of gender inequality.     

Suburban Nongrowth Policies

Because work time and its control are unevenly distributed, it shapes opportunities across different groups in society, both reflecting and reinforcing existing forms of inequality. Work time flexibility is seen by many as a way to promote gender equality by increasing the ability of women to exercise some control over their work time, thus facilitating their ability to participate in paid work while maintaining families. Yet, flexibility may take on very different meanings in different contexts, particularly with respect to the degree of control workers have over important aspects of their working time. This paper examines the meaning and distribution of work time flexibility for women in the United States. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the social construction and gendered nature of work time, and the complex and evolving distribution of work time in the United States. Measures of flexibility that seek to capture different aspects of workers' control over work time are then defined and examined through recent data for male and female workers from the General Social Survey (GSS).     

Trade Liberalization and Gender Wage Inequality in Mexico

Abstract

After twenty years of trade liberalization in Mexico, the relationship between gender wage inequality and trade remains insufficiently studied, in spite of evidence of increasing numbers of women in industrial employment. This study aims to analyze the effects of export orientation and other characteristics that represent the industrial underpinnings of restructuring on gender wage inequality for 2001–5. There is consistent evidence of the negative impact of export orientation on men's and women's wages and the gender wage ratio, signifying that women lose in both absolute and relative terms. This result holds after controlling for women's share of employment and the skills of both genders, contrary to the expected effect from trade on equality. There is also a negative relation between a rise in the proportion of unskilled workers and the gender wage ratio, which suggests that the trade-induced skill hypothesis cannot be considered an adequate explanation for gender inequality.     

Do China's people favour redistribution? Evidence from an incentivized experiment

From 1949, China's leaders brought their country through three decades of income and wealth compression, which was followed by more than three decades of sharply rising inequality. What preferences do China's people hold regarding what price (if any) is worth paying for greater equality? We conduct a laboratory decision‐making experiment mimicking aspects of a macro‐political–economic environment, using Chinese undergraduate student subjects. We find that our subjects have qualitatively similar tastes for equality as their counterparts in parallel US and European experiments; for example, most are willing to sacrifice some payment for more equality of earnings among other participants, and their willingness to do this is stronger when inequalities originate randomly versus based on performance. Considering the cases permitting direct comparison between Chinese and US subjects’ choices, redistributive choices tend to be a bit higher in China if the participant pays no direct cost and a bit lower if he or she pays such a cost, but the two distributions of decisions differ significantly in under 14% of conditions. Survey data too suggests preferences for a more equal income distribution in China than in other East Asian countries, suggesting a possible impact of the Chinese Communist Party dominance in education and media.     

A SOCIAL WELFARE VIEW OF THE MEASUREMENT OF INCOME EQUALITY

Economists' use of the term "equality" in reference to a distribution of incomes has historically been in the sense of a consensus for some statistical characteristic(s) of the distribution rather than a firm concept of equality. Of course such a concept rests on appropriate welfare assumptions about income and its distribution, assumptions which, for the most part, have been left implicit (and unknown) in discussions of income equality in the literature.
Our purpose in this paper is dual: first, we wish to discover an unambiguous, welfare-related equality measure. This we accomplish through suitable assumptions on a social welfare function. What is produced is an "index" of equality which describes the performance of a given distribution relative to the maximum welfare derivable from the total income it represents. The measure thus depends functionally on the welfare attributes of income, something which in reality we know little about.
This impasse leads us to inquire into the sensitivity of the index over specifications of the welfare function, which is done by comparing equality ranks for the states of the United States for 1960 under various functional forms and among curves within a given form. As an interesting secondary issue, the performance of traditional equality measures is tested relative to the welfare-oriented index to discover implications about their welfare content.
It is found that the equality index is, in certain ranges for the welfare function, insensitive to its specification. The findings lead directly to conclusions concerning traditional equality measures, their usefulness in correctly accounting for equality differences among alternative income distributions and, concomitantly, their implicit welfare inputs.     

The trend over time of the gender wage gap in Italy

We analyse gender wage gaps in Italy in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. In this period, important labour market developments took place and they could have had a gender asymmetric impact on wages. We identify the time trends of different components of the gender wage gap across all the wage distribution. Although the unconditional gender wage gap remained roughly constant over time, we find that the component of the gap due to different rewards of similar characteristics deteriorated women’s relative wage. We show that especially women at the centre-top of the wage distribution swam against the tide: while the trend in female qualifications slightly reduced the gender wage gap, the gender-relative trends in the wage structure significantly increased it.