An Empirical Study Of A Linkage Between Gender Equality In Education And Economic Growth

From Solow's traditional growth theory to the endogenous growth theory, many models of economic development have omitted the gender problem of human capital. In recent several decades, economists began to consider the gender inequality in education as an impact factor of economic growth, but this problem has been always out of the sight of the Chinese researchers.The past studies focused on the cross-country and panel regressions. Different scholars have different methods and views upon the study of this gender inequality problem, but basically, they reached the same conclusion: gender inequality in education has obvious negative impact on the economic growth. But whether this result also exists in a single country has not been verified yet.At the first place, this paper uses cross-province and panel data and analyses this problem empirically. The result shows that in our country, higher gender equality in education would promote economic growth, and this impact mechanism includes both direct and indirect impact.But in China, the degree of economic development and gender inequality varies according to the different regions. Since the situation in every region is not the same, the result which comes out of the regression of the panel data in the whole country is not applicable to the region level. So this paper divides the country into three regions: the east region, the middle region and the west region. After investigating these regions empirically, this paper shows that the degree of gender inequality in education exerts very positive impact on the economic growth in each of them. And according to the impact strength, the east region ranks first, the middle region second, and the west region the third. Then this paper also discusses the mechanism of these impacts, and the reason of the differences which emerge in the process.From this paper, we could see that in China reducing the gender inequality would promote economic growth to a very large extent, and it's a win-win policy. But addressing this issue would be a long-term challenge, and should be looked into from social, educational and individual levels.