Women's Role in Economic Development a Significant Impact in the EU Countries?

Literature Review

Bradshaw et al., 2013 considered in their paper that the most crucial evidence that women have an important input to the economic development, was referenced to the research used to support the World Bank’s ‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategy’ launched in 2001 (Dollar & Gatti, 1999; Klasen, 1999). Indeed, this research revealed that the discrimination by gender leaded the society to experience less rapid economic growth and poverty reduction than the societies that treat males and females more equally, and that social gender disparities produce economically inefficient outcomes (World Bank, 2001). For example, it is shown that if African countries had cancelled the gender gap in schooling from 1960 to 1992 as quickly as East Asia did, this would have produced close to a doubling of per capita income growth in the region (WBGDG, 2003). The impact of the discrimination by gender was also examined in the research of (Klasen & Lamanna, 2003) who showed that high levels of gender-specific discrimination in employment artificially restrict the ‘talent pool’ of a nation’s labour force, because less qualified men push potentially highly qualified women out of the job market. Baliamoune-Lutz & McGillivray, 2007 demonstrated also that gender inequalities in literacy have a statistically significant negative effect on income growth.

Women`s labour in the formal market carries more values than women`s work at home and other non-market services (Gaddis & Klasen, 2014), which is considered advantageous to the women and to her environment (family and society) (see also Boserup, 1970; King & Hill, 1997; Mammen & Paxason, 2000; Juhn & Ureta, 2003; Lincove, 2008)).