The Impact of Gender-Specific Human Capital on Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation for Turkey

In this study, how the human capital disaggregated by gender and physical capital affects economic growth in Turkey is examined for the period of 1971–2015. By using an arithmetic average of health and education indicators as a proxy of human capital formation, an attempt was made to examine the relationship between the human capital and economic growth under the scope of gender inequality. In this context, an ARDL-bounds testing approach and the unrestricted error-correction model were used to investigate the co-integration in the long- run and short run. Further, the causality test was also conducted to identify the direction of the causality between the variables. The main finding indicates that male human capital has been the central variable affected by both economic growth and physical capital. On one hand, a significant positive relationship was found between the economic growth and physical capital and male human capital in the long-run, while on the other hand, the female human capital was associated negatively to the economic growth. There is no evidence of causality that links the female human capital to other variables. This result suggests that women are not well utilized in the Turkish economy and the country suffers from untapped potential of women. JEL Classification: F43, C22, J24