Women’s Economic Empowerment: An Integrative Review of Its Antecedents and Consequences

Kumari Dat

doi:10.7176/jpid/56-05

Abstract

The World Bank defines women’s empowerment as a criterion for sustainable development and for the fulfilment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Economic empowerment has been identified as a main fragment of women’s empowerment in literature. Women’s economic empowerment would lead to an expansion of women’s labour force in order to participate as an important factor for inclusive growth of the country. Economic empowerment directly influences the improvement of women’s decision-making power and their financial well-being. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative review of antecedents and consequences of Women’s Economic Empowerment. A comprehensive review of women’s economic empowerment is presenting as an important topic for the policy makers and future researches. An integrative framework and a detailed summary table are provided based on the previous literature. Based on the findings, five main determinants of women’s economic empowerment were identified namely, Decision making power , Controlling over the use of income and expenditure, Leadership in the community, Control over the time allocation and Financial wellbeing. Among the total consequences an inclusive growth revealed as main consequence. The compendium of antecedents and consequences of women’s economic empowerment can be used by policy makers for their policy decisions as to identify the most significant antecedent to improve economic empowerment and to formulate new economic strategies to achieve an inclusive growth as a main consequence of women’s economic empowerment. As new vistas emerge for furthering economic empowerment leading to inclusive growth, this paper provides a timely review and an integrative framework of existing research on women’s economic empowerment and, its antecedents and consequences. This paper contributes to the economics discipline both by integrating a wide body of research on an important economics topic and by offering broad avenues for further research. Keywords: Women’s Economic Empowerment, Decision making power , Controlling over the use of income and expenditure, Leadership in the community, Control over the time allocation and Financial wellbeing. DOI: 10.7176/JPID/56-05 Publication date: November 30 th 2020

Highlights

A universal definition for the term “women’s economic empowerment” is unavailable, many reputed international organizations have attempted to define and explain it on their own
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2015, defines it as, “women’s economic empowerment is the capacity of women to participate in, contribute to and benefit from growth processes in a way that recognizes the value of their contributions, respect their dignity and make it possible to negotiate a fairer distribution of the benefits of growth”
There emerges a need to manage their incomes, savings and investment. This need may be opportunely fulfilled by attaining the financial market so as to achieve the financial wellbeing, which leads to economic empowerment

Summary

Introduction

A universal definition for the term “women’s economic empowerment” is unavailable, many reputed international organizations have attempted to define and explain it on their own. Sustainable social structure comprises social and economic empowerment, financial literacy and financial freedom of women to free access to the formal financial system (Khandker, & Cartwright, 2006) These factors promote their active involvement in development of their own, society and whole nation (Thomas, 1990). It would all lead to the women economic freedom (Hulme & Mosley, 1996) This dimension covers strength of financial decision making benefit of economic growth, financial access, credit, social cohesion, local participation and interaction of formal financial transactions, etc., for betterment of their lives (Mayoux, 1997). In this regard, developing countries give priority financial literacy for more for financial inclusion to improve the economic empowerment of their women. As the women empowerment has been analyzed by previous researchers in different perspectives, some definitions have been summerised into table 1. for getting clear picture about the concept for present study

Conceptual definitions

Malhotra and

Allsopp and

Conclusion