Is the Future Female? A Study on Educational Attainment and Economic Development

This paper studies the impact of women's secondary and tertiary level educational attainment on economic growth. I regress GDP per capita growth on female and male educational attainment as well as a set of control variables across 141 countries, in 5 year-time periods, from the years 1965 to 2010. Each country in the dataset is classified as low-income, lower middle-income, higher middle-income, and high-income based on their GNP. My results suggest that female secondary education has a positive and significant effect on GDP per capita growth after 1985. When regressing GDP per capita separately on each income group category, I find this effect only present for low-income countries. No significant effect was found for middle- or high-income countries. Additionally, my results report that female tertiary education has a positive and significant impact on GDP per capita growth for high-income countries. I reference the U-Shape hypothesis, which suggests that female labor force participation first declines then rises as economies develop, to provide a potential explanation for those results. I conclude that these results offer an optimistic outlook for low-income countries; secondary education currently drives growth, and returns to tertiary education are expected to follow as development progresses.