Gender inequality, technological progress, and the demographic transition

Nguyen Thang Dao and Julio Dávila

No 2015038, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: This paper proposes a new mechanism linking technology, the gender gap in education, and fertility in a growth model in order to explain the long run transition from stagnation to modern sustained growth, through the demographic transition, and the accompanying improvements in gender equality in education and income. The mechanism includes three main components. First, increases in the level of technology not only increase the return to human capital but also reduce women's time in doing housework, leaving women with more time for child care and labor-force participation, since technological progress creates labour-saving products for doing housework. Second, the decreases in women's time devoted to housework in the future make households today invest relatively less in education for their sons in order to invest more in education for their daughters because the marginal return to female education is higher than that to male education, therefore, improving the gender equality in education. Third, the better gender equality in education, in turn, accelerates the technological progress. This positive feedback loop generates a demographic transition accompanied with accelerated economic growth.

Keywords: Technological progress; gender inequality in education; demographic transition; fertility, human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J13 J16 O11 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2015.html (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2015038

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS ().