Gender Equality and Countries’ Financial and Economic Well-Being: New Evidence from Emerging Economies

This article empirically examines whether and to what extent gender equality in education, economic activity, and employment affects the financial and economic well-being of African and Asian countries. Based on data collected from ILOSTAT and World Bank, we perform Pooled Ordinary Least Square, Fixed Effect, and Random-effect regressions on a sample of thirty-four countries over the period spanning from 2000 to 2019. Overall, our evidence reveals a relationship between gender equality and financial and economic well-being. Gender parity in education, economic activity, and employment appears to have a positive effect on the overall health of the countries analysed, considerably increasing their economic growth measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and financial growth measured by the level of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The finding of this study provides further support to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (SDGs) aimed at empowering women and achieving gender equality by acting on education and employment.