Gender Equality and Economic Growth in India: A Quantitative Framework

Pierre-Richard Agénor, Jan Mares and Piritta Sorsa
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Piritta Sorsa: OECD

No 1263, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper studies how public policies, including pro-women interventions, can raise female labour force participation and promote economic growth in India. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based OLG model, based on Agénor (2015) and Agénor and Canuto (2015), that accounts for women’s time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, conditional cash transfers, and a reduction in gender bias in the market place. The analysis shows raising female labour force participation with a package of pro-growth and pro-women policies could boost the growth rate by about 2 percentage points over time.

Keywords: female labour force participation; gender; gender equality; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I25 J16 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-dge, nep-gro and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1263-en

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