Economic Growth and Gender Inequalities in Labor Force Participation and Education in Kenya
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Date
2015Author
Indangasi, Jescah N
Type
ThesisLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The main development goal of Kenyan government is to raise economic growth and
reduce gender inequality. However, majority of the Kenyans still remain in poverty
and gender inequality is widening. To achieve its vision 2030, the government need
deliberate win-win policies that aim at reducing gender inequality and raising
economic growth. To provide the relevant information necessary for designing these
policies, this study sought to investigate the effect of gender inequality in education
and labor force participation on economic growth using time series data for the
period between 1990 and 2012. The study used Autoregressive Distributed Lag model
(ARDL) to examine how gender inequality is affected by the education system labor
force participation on the growth of the economy. The key findings show that gender
inequality in education had a negative effect on economic growth in both short and
long run .The coefficient for gender inequality in education was -3.74730 implying
that a unit rise in gender inequality in education would reduce economic growth by
3.75 percent. However, in the long run, gender inequality in education would reduce
economic growth by 12 percent. On the other hand, gender inequality in labor force
participation had no effect on economic growth. Further, other results from the study
indicate that inflation had negative effect on economic growth in the short run and
investment had positive effect on economic growth in the long run. Openness was
found to have no effect on economic growth in both short and long run. The study
recommends that the Kenyan government should focus on policies that ensure that the
girl child has access to not only primary and secondary education but also
institutions of higher learning in order to increase gender equality. Moreover,
government should aim at increasing and attracting investment in various sectors of
the economy and should stabilize and maintain low inflation rates that are conducive
for economic growth.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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