Female Education Externality and Inclusive Growth

Gihoon Hong, Soyoung Kim, Geunhwan Park and Seung-Gyu Sim
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Gihoon Hong: Department of Economics, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Korea
Soyoung Kim: Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Geunhwan Park: Department of Economics, Pusan National University, Busan 46241, Korea
Seung-Gyu Sim: Department of International Economics, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo 150-8366, Japan

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-12

Abstract: Education is generally believed to be beneficial in fostering, independent of gender, higher labor productivity. Female education may, however, cause other socio-economic gains which are not captured by higher wage or better compensation package for the educated female worker in the labor market (positive externality). This paper investigates the casual effect of enhancing female education and reducing gender education inequality on various measures of sustainable development. After addressing the endogeneity issue associated with gender education inequality employing a novel instrumental variable (IV), we find mitigating gender education inequality to be associated with lower infant mortality and poverty rates and improvements in health and environmental conditions. Our IV estimation result reports that a one-standard-deviation increase in the female-to-male ratio of average years of schooling is associated with a lower poverty rate by about 0.98 percentage points. The results indicate that expanding women’s educational opportunities is an effective way to promote inclusive growth.

Keywords: female education externality; sustainable development; inclusive growth; instrumental variables estimation; returns to education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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