The effect of female empowerment on long-term government spending

Female empowerment is a crucial phenomenon taken seriously by many countries. Increased labor force participation, educational attainment and political representation are all the ways that can be used to empower women and make their voices, needs, concerns and demands heard. The importance can be better understood when the differing preferences of men and women are discussed. Women tend to spend the majority of each additional income obtained for their family, the education and health of their children compared to men. Additionally, women are more patient and altruistic. In the light of these pieces of information, it can be said that they would favor a larger share of government spending to be dedicated to longer-term investments that can be considered as altruistic, such as health, education, and environmental protection areas. In this study, it is hypothesized that increased female labor participation share, educational attainment and political representation are correlated with the increased share of government spending on education and health in GDP. A panel of 38 OECD countries is examined and it is revealed that the predicted correlation exists most of the time. However, the observed associations are driven by the effect of time series and they are not as strongly as guided by the cross-country differences since the variation between the countries is too high to be the driving force behind the relationships revealed here.