Are educational gender gaps a brake on economic development? Some cross-country empirical evidence

Abstract

This paper estimates a neoclassical growth model that includes female and male education as separate explanatory variables. The model can be reparameterised so that the gender gap in education enters the model. The interpretation of its coefficient depends crucially on what other education variables appear in the equation. The average longrun effects of female and male education on output per worker are estimated for a cross section of countries using long time averages of the data. The results support the World Bank's emphasis on the importance of female education in raising labour productivity and are robust to various sensitivity analyses.

Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction: Measurement Issues using Income and Non-Income Indicators

“…The majority of studies seems to suggest that high initial inequality is harmful for overall economic growth, and thus for poverty reduction, at least in environments of very high (income or asset) inequality (see, for example, World Bank, 2000Bank, , 2005aDeininiger and Squire, 1998;Klasen, 2004;Ravallion, 2000). Similar results appear to hold true for gender inequality, particularly gender inequality in education (Klasen, 2002;Knowles et al, 2002;World Bank, 2001). There consequently is a triple pay-off to lowering inequality: it reduces poverty immediately, it increases the poverty elasticity of growth, and it appears to increase economic growth, at least in some contexts.…”

The Impact of Gender Inequality in Education and Employment on Economic Growth: New Evidence for a Panel of Countries

“…Dollar and Gatti, 1999). Moreover, if there are declining marginal returns to education, restricting the education of girls to lower levels while taking the education of boys to higher levels means that the marginal return to educating girls is higher than that of boys and thus would boost overall economic performance (World Bank 2001;Knowles et al 2002).…”

“…King and Hill (1993) as well as Knowles et al (2002) use a Solow-growth framework and find that gender gaps in education significantly reduce the level of GDP. Dollar and Gatti (1999), Forbes (2000), Yamarik and Ghosh (2003), Appiah and McMahon (2002) and Klasen (2002) investigate the impact of gender gaps on economic growth and all find that gender gaps in education have a negative impact on subsequent economic growth.…”

“…While the use of regional dummy variables is invariably a measure of our ignorance, in many cross-country regressions they turn out to be significant pointing to region-specific left-out variables that are hard to capture in standard cross-country regressions. 19 Knowles et al (2002) suggest that this is the most suitable specification for analyzing gender gaps in education. This specification was also used in Klasen (2002 The first equation measures the direct impact of education and the gender bias in education on economic growth, as it controls for investment, population and labor force growth.…”

“…While some earlier studies had suggested that gender inequality in education might actually increase economic growth (Robert Barro and Jong-Wha Lee 1994; Barro and Xavier Sala-IMartin 1995), more recent work has shown that the opposite appears to be the case (Anne Hill and Elizabeth King 1995;David Dollar and Roberta Gatti 1999;Kristin Forbes 2000;Stephen Knowles, Paula Lorgelly and Dorian Owen 2002;Stephan Klasen 2002;Steven Yamarik and Sucharita Ghosh 2003;Dina Abu-Ghaida and Klasen 2004). These studies not only differed from previous analyses in their findings of the impact of gender inequality on economic growth, but also were able to explain why earlier studies had found the opposite effect and why more careful econometric techniques yielded the new finding that gender inequality in education reduces economic growth.…”