Research and development expenditure gap: does women’s political empowerment matter?

Désiré Avom and Brice Kamguia

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2025, vol. 34, issue 3, 392-417

Abstract: Sustained economic growth has been high on the list of priorities of many developed and developing nations, and the importance of new technology to sustained economic growth has long been recognized in the literature. Despite the extent of this literature and the importance of innovation to economic outcomes, surprisingly little is known about the effect of women’s political empowerment in the research sector. This study proposes filling this gap by examining the effect of women’s political empowerment on research and development expenditure. Using data from 66 developed and developing countries and system GMM estimation, we show that women’s political empowerment has exerted, on average, a positive effect on research and development investment. Moreover, further study shows that women's level of participation in civil society has the largest effect, followed by women’s civil liberties. By analyzing these underlying transmission channels, we find that this effect is partly due to the positive effects of women's political empowerment on the accumulation of human capital and on institutional quality, which in turn improve the level of spending on research and development. Based on these results, economic policy implications are discussed.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10438599.2024.2348029 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ecinnt:v:34:y:2025:i:3:p:392-417

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GEIN20

DOI: 10.1080/10438599.2024.2348029

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Innovation and New Technology is currently edited by Professor Cristiano Antonelli

More articles in Economics of Innovation and New Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().