Women's education and growth

One of the spin-offs from my research on technology's effect on economic growth is a computer program for generating estimates of the effect of almost any variable on growth, using multiple models, and quickly. Anyone want to know how much having a good football team is linked to economic growth?

Not many people, but the link between discrimination against women in education and economic growth is of interest, what with there being a lot of women and their having a large effect on economies. I took women's and men's literacy rates by country from the UN statistical database, and calculated five year averages since 1980. The base model for adding the literacy variable was Solow using Penn World Table data, and the alternative was education augmented Solow with population and technological growth dropped as variables to avoid over identification. Data limitations and a wish to avoid complication meant that a within group OLS was used with robust standard errors.

Increasing equality in literacy was associated with increased growth in both models, though as usual with regressions causality cannot be established. The variable was 1% significant in the first model, though not even 10% significant in the second. The other variables did what was expected of them, with the coefficient magnitudes anticipated on the lag terms.

Not much estimation here, but the couple of results could form the basis for a more substantial work. The question of whether women's equality is good for capitalist growth, and in what forms, is or used to be discussed in feminist works looking at the merits of the liberal and left-wing strands of the theory.