Summary Findings of Literature Review on Gender, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth

Many studies find that gender-based inequalities in education reduce economic growth, because such inequalities decrease the overall human capital available within the country. Notwithstanding the methodological limitations alluded to earlier, Morrison, Raju, and Sinha (2007) report striking findings from work undertaken by Klasen (2002). Klasen estimates the effect of the gender gap in years of total schooling in the adult population on per capita income growth, using cross-country and panel regressions for the 1960–92 period for 109 industrial and developing countries. He finds that the direct and indirect effects of gender inequality in educational attainment account for 0.95 percentage points of the 2.5 percentage point gap in growth rates between South Asia and East Asia; 0.56 percentage points of the 3.3 percentage point gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia; and 0.85 percentage points of the 1.9 percentage point gap between the Middle East and North Africa and East Asia.