Female Labor Participation in the Arab World : Some Evidence from Panel Data in Morocco
Female labor participation in the Arab world is low compared with the level of economic development of Arab countries. Beyond anecdotal evidence and cross-country studies, there is little evidence on what could explain this phenomenon. This paper u...
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank Group, Washington, DC
2014
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2014/09/20205985/female-labor-participation-arab-world-some-evidence-panel-data-morocco http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20328 |
| Summary: | Female labor participation in the Arab
world is low compared with the level of economic development
of Arab countries. Beyond anecdotal evidence and
cross-country studies, there is little evidence on what
could explain this phenomenon. This paper uses the richest
set of panel data available for any Arab country to date to
model female labor participation in Morocco. The paper finds
marriage, household inactivity rates, secondary education,
and gross domestic product per capita to lower female labor
participation rates. It also finds that the category urban
educated women with secondary education explains better than
others the low level of female labor participation. These
surprising findings are robust to different estimators,
endogeneity tests, different specifications of the female
labor participation equations, and different sources of
data. The findings are also consistent with previous studies
on the Middle East and North Africa region and on Morocco.
The explanation seems to reside in the nature of economic
growth and gender norms. Economic growth has not been labor
intensive, has generated few jobs, and has not been in
female-friendly sectors, resulting in weak demand for women,
especially urban educated women with secondary education.
And when men and women compete for scarce jobs, men may have
priority access because of employers' and
households' preferences. |
|---|