Publication:
Economic empowerment of women: exploring financial inclusion and economic growth
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Date
2021
Authors
SDG:
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Abstract
Women consist of almost half of the world’s population but are disadvantaged in all human development fields. They face barriers in access to valued resources which include education, health, employment, access and ownership of land, banking and finance. Despite recent advances in important aspects of the lives of girls and women, pervasive challenges remain, most often as a result of widespread constraints which often violate women's basic human rights. These differences matter as they directly affect economic outcomes. We therefore make the economic empowerment of women the focus of this study. Research on women’s economic empowerment can be approached in several ways. We look at two very basic and essential aspects; financial inclusion and economic growth. First, we gain insights into the gender gap in the economic empowerment of women through the financial inclusion lens. Second, this study explores women’s economic empowerment and its relationship with economic growth. We address the first issue in two ways. First, at the micro-level by focusing on a data set of 6,000 individuals from the country of Pakistan. The country represents not only a Muslim majority country but also ranks amongst the lowest in women empowerment indicators. Second, we look at the status of financial inclusion of women on a global level by focusing on data of 140 countries and segregate the data from the World Bank and United Nations on women for 42 OIC member countries and 108 developing countries in order to compare. For the second issue we look at the relationship between economic growth and women’s economic empowerment with the data for OIC countries and developing countries from the same sources with additional indicators on Political Risk from ICRG.
Keywords
Developing countries , Economic growth , Financial inclusion , OIC member countries , Pakistan , Women's economic empowerment
Citation
Khan, A. (2021). Economic empowerment of women: exploring financial inclusion and economic growth (Doctoral dissertation). INCEIF, Kuala Lumpur. Retrieved from https://ikr.inceif.org/handle/INCEIF/3659
Publisher
INCEIF
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