Market Openness and Culture as Factors that Shape the Gender Gap: a Comparative Study of Urban Latin America and East Asia (1960-2000)

Enriqueta Camps-Cura

No 694, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we present: 1. The available data on comparative gender inequality at the macroeconomic level and 2. Gender inequality measures at the microeconomic and case study level. We see that market openness has a significant effect on the narrowing of the human capital gender gap. Globalization and market openness stand as factors that improve both the human capital endowments of women and their economic position. But we also see that the effects of culture and religious beliefs are very different. While Catholicism has a statistically significant influence on the improvement of the human capital gender gap, Muslim and Buddhist religious beliefs have the opposite effect and increase human capital gender differences. In the second global era, some Catholic Latin American countries benefited from market openness in terms of the human capital and income gender gap, whereas we find the opposite impact in Buddhist and Muslim countries like China and South Korea where women's economic position has worsened both in terms of human capital and wage inequality.

Keywords: human capital; wage inequality; Gender Gap; Religion; Culture; market openness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 N3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-lam and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/694-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:694

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().