Female Labour Force Participation and Economic Growth: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence

Authors:

Kiran Sharma, Dr. Madhuri Desai, Prof. Stevan Johnson

Keywords:

Labour Force Participation ,Empirical Evidence,Economic Growth

Abstract:

In this paper, we have developed an augmented version of Solow growth model, including gender shares. The Solow model augmented by gender predicts that income per capita increases with the share of women employment. Following this, derived theoretical relationships are empirically tested using panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach. We applied this methodology on a Solow growth model for 122 countries for the period between 1990 and 2014. The results show that the empirical evidence is consistent with the theoretical prediction. We suggest that increasing women employment would lead to an increase in economic growth, and hence in welfare