Promoting Women’s Empowerment: Linkages Between Financial Development, Employment and Economic Growth in Selected African Economies

Abstract

Women’s empowerment (WE) is one of the main challenges to economic development in African countries. Scholars have criticized national development initiatives to focus on well-being issues and treat women as the passive beneficiaries of welfare-enhancing assistance. This study uses panel fully modified least square and vector error correction model to investigate the impact of interactive effects of WE and financial development (FD) on employment and economic growth based on the World Bank income group as follows: upper-middle-income countries (UMIC), lower-middle-income countries (LMIC), and low-income countries (LIC). The findings show that the interactive effects of WE and FD on output and employment is not significant in the long run in LMIC and LIC. Despite the significance of these interactive effects in UMIC, the coefficient is less than one. Also, the causality result in the UMIC shows feedback between WE and economic growth. And that FD has a direct influence on growth in LMIC, while WE has a direct influence on employment in LIC.