Women's political empowerment and natural resource curse in developing countries

Abstract

Women's political rights are increasingly recognized as critical to modern states. Women constitute half of the world's population, but they account for less than a quarter of the membership of national parliaments globally. Starting from the “resource curse" literature, this paper empirically examines the impact of natural resource abundance on women's political empowerment in a large panel of 130 developing countries between 2002 and 2017. Our results derived from two-step system GMM show that total resource rent per capita has a strong negative impact on overall women's political empowerment. Similar evidences are found when using women's political participation, civil society participation, and women's civil liberties subindexes separately. We also find large differences in the resource abundance women's political empowerment relationship, depending on a country's institutional quality. Furthermore, we explore some transmission channels and find that resource abundance reduces female employment in the manufacturing and exchangeable service sectors, increases gender inequality in primary and secondary education, and increases female fertility rate.