IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v22y2016i2p168-195.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Economic Development and Women's Labor Force Participation in India

Author

Listed:
  • Rahul Lahoti
  • Hema Swaminathan

Abstract

India has experienced steady economic growth over the last two decades alongside a persistent decline in women's labor force participation (LFPR). This paper explores the relationship between economic development and women's labor supply using state-level data spanning the period 1983–4 to 2011–2. While several studies suggest a U-shaped relationship between development and women's labor force participation, our results suggest that at the state level, there is no systematic U-shaped relationship between level of domestic product and women's LFPR. On examining the relationship between the structure of the economy and women's economic activity, we find that it is not economic growth but rather the composition of growth that is relevant for women. Further, our results suggest that aggregate changes in the proportion of women in the workforce can be mostly attributed to the movement of the workforce across sectors rather than changes in the proportion of women workers within a sector.

Suggested Citation

  • Rahul Lahoti & Hema Swaminathan, 2016. "Economic Development and Women's Labor Force Participation in India," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(2), pages 168-195, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:22:y:2016:i:2:p:168-195
    DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2015.1066022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2015.1066022
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13545701.2015.1066022?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Veeramani, Choorikkad & Banerjee, Purna, 2022. "Exchange rate fluctuations, labour laws, and gender differences in job flows: Analysis of manufacturing industries across Indian states," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    2. Nancy Luke, 2019. "Gender and social mobility: Exploring gender attitudes and women's labour force participation," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2019-108, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    3. Islam, Asad & Pakrashi, Debayan & Sahoo, Soubhagya & Wang, Liang Choon & Zenou, Yves, 2021. "Gender inequality and caste: Field experimental evidence from India," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 190(C), pages 111-124.
    4. Lv, Zhike & Yang, Rudai, 2018. "Does women’s participation in politics increase female labor participation? Evidence from panel data analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 170(C), pages 35-38.
    5. Varsha P. S. & Gayathri Reddy K. & Sudheendra Rao L. N. & Amit Kumar, 2019. "Impact of self-help groups, capacity building measures and perceived tension on women empowerment- an empirical study," Asian Journal of Empirical Research, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 9(3), pages 65-87, March.
    6. Nthabeleng Lillian Moshoeshoe & Baorong Yu, 2021. "Economic Growth and Participation of Women in Labor Markets: The Case of Southern Africa," International Journal of Science and Business, IJSAB International, vol. 5(1), pages 30-41.
    7. Lahiri, Bidisha & Daramola, Richard, 2023. "Effects of credit and labor constraints on microenterprises and the unintended impact of changes in household endowments: Use of threshold estimation to detect heterogeneity," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 88(C), pages 21-38.
    8. Dhanaraj, Sowmya & Mahambare, Vidya, 2019. "Family structure, education and women’s employment in rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 17-29.
    9. Chi-Wei Su & Zheng-Zheng Li & Ran Tao & Oana-Ramona Lobonţ, 2019. "Can economic development boost the active female labor force?," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 53(2), pages 1021-1036, March.
    10. Sarkar, Sudipa & Sahoo, Soham & Klasen, Stephan, 2019. "Employment transitions of women in India: A panel analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 291-309.
    11. Seneviratne, Prathi, 2020. "Gender wage inequality during Sri Lanka’s post-reform growth: A distributional analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    12. Shreya Biswas, 2021. "She Innovates- Female owner and firm innovation in India," Papers 2109.09515, arXiv.org.
    13. Cong Wang & Amjad Naveed, 2021. "Can Women Empowerment Explain Cross-Country Differences in Inequality? A Global Perspective," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 158(2), pages 667-697, December.
    14. Sapna Goel, 2022. "Effect of Deagrarianization at the Household Level on the Scale and Nature of Women’s Work in Rural India," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 65(4), pages 1053-1082, December.
    15. Antara Bhattacharyya & Sushil Kr. Haldar, 2020. "Does U Feminisation Work in Female Labour Force Participation Rate? India: A Case Study," The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Springer;The Indian Society of Labour Economics (ISLE), vol. 63(1), pages 143-160, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:22:y:2016:i:2:p:168-195. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.