Women economic empowerment on educational expenditure among regions in the Philippines
Date
2017
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Abstract
Women empowerment has often been cited as crucial to human capital investments
in education, which in turn tend to spur economic growth and development. This
study thus aims to test the claim that greater women economic empowerment
increases household education spending in the Philippine context. Using principal
components analysis, we derive the Composite Index of Women Empowerment
(CIWE) per region. Specifically, the CIWE consists of determinants of women’s
involvement in the economic decision-making in each household – as lifted from the
National Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) 2013 -- namely, women’s control
over their own earnings, women’s control over their husbands’ earnings, decision
making towards health care, decision making towards major household purchases,
decision making towards purchases for daily household needs, and decision making
towards visits to family or relatives. We then measure the effect of CIWE on
household educational expenditure through Ordinary Least Squares (OLS)
estimations on households included in the Family Income and Expenditure Survey
(FIES) 2012. Controlling for regional, urban/rural and other household-specific
characteristics, our results suggest that greater women economic empowerment
robustly positively affects household educational expenditure, confirming that
women economic empowerment is vital in societal or government efforts to spur
human capital investment on education.
Description
Keywords
education, expenditure, MEDICINE::Surgery::Obstetrics and women's diseases, empowerment