Impact of Digital Economy on Female Employment: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

This paper investigates impact of e-economic activities on female employment rates in Turkey over 1994–2016. The analysis unveils three major findings. First, 80.74% of variations in female employment are accounted by e-commerce and control variables. Second, Autoregressive Distributed Lag analysis documents that these series (female employment, e-commerce and control variables) are cointegrated, thus, a unit increase in per credit card e-commerce transactions leads the female employment rate to grow by 0.13 units in long-run at 1% significance level, whereas a percentage increase in internet penetration rate in Turkey augments the rates by 0.33%. Third, error-correction model analysis refers that the system quickly corrects its previous period disequilibrium converging at a speed of 75.43%, and also documents that the lags of per credit card e-commerce jointly have short-run impact on female employment rates. Thus, the study concludes that developing e-commerce incentivizing policies might help to empower women in Turkey significantly.