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Does the political empowerment of women increase human development? Using equality of access to schooling and health as indicators of pro-poor development policy and objective measures of female school completion and child mortality under the age of five as measures of human capital development, pooled ordinary least square (OLS) fixed effects regressions show robustly that the political empowerment of women associates positively with higher human capital. These results are statistically significant and substantively large, and the effects of gender empowerment trump those of democracy and good governance. Since the political empowerment of women is driven by structural conditions underlying democracy and economic development, the independent effect of gender empowerment relative to effects of democracy and institutional quality suggests a powerful role for the former. Interactions between gender empowerment and factors associated with higher child mortality; namely, strict autocracy and the Middle East and North Africa region, suggest that empowerment conditions these known adverse factors in the direction of lower child mortality. For addressing endogeneity, we use 10- and 20-year lagged values of gender empowerment as instruments for current empowerment, which pass both instrument relevance and instrument exclusion criteria. Two-stage least square regressions confirm our basic results. While the causal effects of gender empowerment remain somewhat speculative, a barrage of tests on our data suggests a powerful role for gender empowerment for increasing human capital.

Does Empowering Women in Politics Boost Human Development? An Empirical Analysis, 1960–2018