Independent Research

Is the Future Female? A Study on Educational Attainment & Economic Development

---

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of women’s secondary and tertiary level educational attainment on economic growth. I regress GDP per capita growth on female and male educational attainment as well as a set of control variables across 141 countries, in 5 year-time periods, from the years 1965 to 2010. Each country in the dataset is classified as low-income, lower middle-income, higher middle-income, and high-income based on their GNP. My results suggest that female secondary education has a positive and significant effect on GDP per capita growth after 1985. When regressing GDP per capita separately on each income group category, I find this effect only present for low-income countries. No significant effect was found for middle- or high-income countries. Additionally, my results report that female tertiary education has a positive and significant impact on GDP per capita growth for high-income countries. I reference the U-Shape hypothesis, which suggests that female labor force participation first declines then rises as economies develop, to provide a potential explanation for those results. I conclude that these results offer an optimistic outlook for low-income countries; secondary education currently drives growth, and returns to tertiary education are expected to follow as development progresses.

Plain Language Summary

The growing global momentum to educate girls and women raises an important question: how might they shape the economies of tomorrow? This study looks at how female education impacts economic development, which broadly refers to the expansion of a country’s economy and the improvement of social welfare. I focus on two levels of education: secondary (high school) and tertiary (college or university). I find that in low-income countries (LICs), girls’ secondary education is linked to economic growth. In high-income countries (HICs), it is women’s tertiary education that makes a bigger difference. These patterns point to structural transformation, which refers to the idea that the types of jobs in an economy evolve over time. Research shows that this evolution leads to a U-shape in women’s labor force participation: it is high in agricultural economies, falls as countries industrialize and shift toward factory work, and then rises again as jobs move into services. These findings suggest that for LICs, policy efforts should focus on enabling girls to advance through their secondary education before turning to broader goals like expanding access to tertiary education. Future research could examine how barriers in the job markets of HICs may limit the full economic returns to women’s educational gains.

Keywords: economic development, female education, U-shape hypothesis, comparative study