An Influence of Women on ASEAN Economic Growth

Abstract

Supported by the transition of the economy and the increasing of woman’s ability and numbers, women have increasingly played a significant role in economic growth. As women have participated more in business and economic activities, they become a part of career and income creation and thus economic growth. Such causalities have been supported by some pieces of evidence produced by previous researches. However, some variables, missing from the previous works, still need to be investigated and confirmed in general. Thus in this work, we incorporated such variables in our study. To meet our objectives, we test the effect of 3 women related variables, namely labour force, life expectancy, and self-employment, on economic growth. We obtained the data of 10 ASEAN countries from the World Bank database which covers the period between 1994 and 2018. The effects of women related variables on economic growth were investigated by a panel regression technique. The results produced from the usual process and cointegration test revealed that the labour force and self-employment had a positive impact on economic growth, while life expectancy had a negative one which can be explained by the U-shape concept. Hence it comes to the suggestions that if the government expects to encourage economic growth, it needs to improve women life expectancy through public investment in women health and education, increase women self-employment by launching public projects for developing business relating skills, and prepare the business and economic environment to support women workforce participation.