Women's economic empowerment and poverty: Specification empirics examining global data

Two measures of women's economic empowerment (1) number of female business owners and (2) the number of female sole proprietors are used as women's entrepreneurial surrogates to determine the impact of women's economic empowerment on poverty globally. Using a Fixed-effect model (FEM) and dominance analysis (DA) as an estimation technique, this study sampled carefully ninety-five (95) countries for which data is available for the years 2002 to 2021. These countries are further subdivided into regions for further examinations. Based on the global dataset, the study concludes that the number of female business owners across the study sample significantly contribute to poverty reduction. It is pertinent to emphasize that policy measures that aim to increase the share of female business owners on a worldwide scale should incorporate the poverty threshold. In terms of regional blocks classifications, varied results are produced for both number of female business owners and number of female sole proprietors. This study is anticipated to be valuable in terms of originality since it provides a precise and coherent understanding of the genuine measure on women's economic empowerment that must be placed, from the perspective of global dataset and regional blocks, to reduce global poverty more effectively.