Determinants of Women’s Labour Force Participation In Developing Countries - An Empirical Study of Female Education Expenditure from Bangladesh.

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates how government expenditure on female education impacts women’s labor force participation in Bangladesh by exploiting the country’s National Education Policy 2010 as an exogenous source of variation. By employing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, the study analyzes the causal relationship between educational attainment and labor market participation in two stages. The first stage reveals that exposure to NEP 2010 increased years of schooling by approximately 0.28 years. However, in the second stage, a surprising negative relationship between additional years of schooling and women’s labor force participation emerges. These findings highlight the complexity of the relationship between education policies and labor market outcomes for women. The findings of the paper implies that the policy makers should prioritize overcoming socio-economic obstacles in order to maximize the effects of educational reforms on female labour force participation. By exploiting the primary school reform in Bangladesh, this paper contributes to the existing literature on education and female labour force participation.