The Impact of Female Empowerment on Income Inequality—Evidence from 96 Countries

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-042-8_104How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Female empowerment; income inequality; Gini index; instrumental variable; quantile regression

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of female empowerment on income inequality. The causes of income inequality have been widely discussed, but few studies pay attention to gender factors. This paper constructs indicators from the perspectives of reproductive health, political and educational rights, labor market participation and gender equality to measure women’s empowerment in a country. The hypothesis here is that female empowerment can help promote income equality. After using the ordinary least square method to study the observations from 96 countries, the baseline results confirm this hypothesis. Keeping other conditions constant, empowering women in terms of fertility, politics, education and labor participation can reduce income inequality, although the significance is different. Moreover, equality of power between male and female can also promote overall income equality. In order to eliminate potential simultaneity problems, instrumental variables are used. The results of the two-stage least square method are basically consistent with the baseline results. Quantile analysis provides interesting insights. In countries with large Gini index, female participation in the labor market does not have a significant impact on income equality.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yujiao Li
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/29
TI  - The Impact of Female Empowerment on Income Inequality—Evidence from 96 Countries
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on mathematical statistics and economic analysis (MSEA 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 726
EP  - 732
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-042-8_104
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-042-8_104
ID  - Li2022
ER  -