Abstract
Education is generally believed to be beneficial in fostering, independent of gender, higher labor productivity. Female education may, however, cause other socio-economic gains which are not captured by higher wage or better compensation package for the educated female worker in the labor market (positive externality). This paper investigates the casual effect of enhancing female education and reducing gender education inequality on various measures of sustainable development. After addressing the endogeneity issue associated with gender education inequality employing a novel instrumental variable (IV), we find mitigating gender education inequality to be associated with lower infant mortality and poverty rates and improvements in health and environmental conditions. Our IV estimation result reports that a one standard deviation increase in the female-to-male ratio of average years of schooling is associated with a lower poverty rate by about 0.98 percentage points. The results indicate that expanding women's educational opportunities is an effective way to promote inclusive growth.
Highlights
The standard theory of human capital and economic growth posits that a substantial portion of human capital is accumulated through schooling and utilized in producing goods and services
Our results suggest that expanding women’s educational opportunities especially at the primary education level is an effective way to promote inclusive growth for developed as well as developing countries
JβjXij + εi where Yi is the level of economic growth of country i, measured by the health index (HI), human development index (HDI), environmental performance index (EPI), infant mortality rate (IMR), and poverty rate (PR), as well as the traditional growth measure of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, YSi,MALE denotes the average years of schooling received by the male population, years of schooling proxies for the average level of human capital possessed by the workforce, and the key explanatory variable, is the ratio of the average years of schooling received by the female and the male population, in country i
Summary
The standard theory of human capital and economic growth posits that a substantial portion of human capital is accumulated through schooling and utilized in producing goods and services. The socially efficient level of education investment presumes the private and social return to education to be the same Motivated by this argument, the present paper sheds lights on the female education externality by shifting the focus on social return to female human capital from the traditional economic growth measure of gross domestic product (GDP) to alternative inclusive growth measures. That when the scope of analysis is expanded to consider gender differences in nurturing, feeding, and educating their families (including themselves), the marginal benefit of education differs between mothers and fathers We extend this idea to examine social returns to female rather than male human capital because a larger gap between social and private returns is more likely to be observed in the case of the former.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
