Abstract
The relationships between public spending, employment, and growth are already complex and yet this complexity increases when considering employment disaggregated by gender. This paper analyzes the effects that public spending on social infrastructure (healthcare and education) has on women’s relative employment using a panel dataset of 138 countries from 1995 to 2011. The panel data consisted of publicly-available data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the Educational Attainment Dataset, the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, and the World Governance Indicators. Employment was estimated under three separate specifications (the female employment rate, the male employment rate, and a measure of gender equality in employment) which were included in a three-stage least squares simultaneous equation estimation. The results indicate that both categories of social infrastructure spending are positively related to women’s relative employment. Furthermore, the process of industrialization, the size of the population, and trade are all negatively related to women’s relative employment. This paper has significant social and practical implications for gender-sensitive public policy discussions by providing empirical evidence in support of healthcare and education.
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Notes
Agency here is defined by Braunstein (2008, p. 6) as “a process whereby individuals define their goals and act upon them; and achievements, which are the outcomes of empowerment.”
This is not to say that unpaid care work should be seen as an unwanted burden as such work is valuable and fundamental for any society (Braunstein & Houston, 2015), but rather to suggest that simple public expenditures can support individuals fulfilling these roles (often women) and reduce the time required to complete many of the corresponding tasks.
All countries with at least one observation for spending on education, healthcare, exports, imports, the size of the labor force, and educational attainment were included in the panel dataset. A comprehensive list of the regional division of countries is available upon request.
Per the World Development Indicators (World Bank 2017), part-time employment includes all individuals who are regular employees, yet are working hours that are substantially less than the typical full-time employee. Countries may choose to define part-time employment differently and thus there is no standard hour-based definition.
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Knight, T. Women’s Employment and Public Spending: A Cross-Country Study. Int Adv Econ Res 28, 1–17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11294-022-09851-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11294-022-09851-w