Gender inequality and marketisation hypothesis in Sub-Saharan Africa

The School of Economics and Business Sciences will host Tendai Zawaira from the University of Pretoria to deliver a talk based on the above paper.

The marketisation hypothesis states that the growth of the service sector reduces gender inequality. This is because women have a comparative advantage in service jobs and consequently benefit more than men as the sector grows. In recent years, the African service sector has grown considerably; however, gender inequality on the continent is still relatively high. Using a new dataset on gender inequality and panel data analysis, the researchers study the relationship between service sector shares and gender inequality in 31 sub-Saharan African countries during the 1990-2014 period. Consistent with predictions of the hypothesis, service sector shares significantly reduce gender inequality and the results are robust after the inclusion of a wide range of controls. However, we find that this relationship is nonlinear, requiring that the size of the service sector reaches a threshold before we observe improvements in gender inequality.

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