Gender Equality and Economic Growth in India

This paper studies how public policies, including pro-women interventions, can raise female labour force participation and promote economic growth in India. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based OLG model, based on Agénor (2015) and Agénor and Canuto (2015), that accounts for women’s time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, conditional cash transfers, and a reduction in gender bias in the market place. The analysis shows raising female labour force participation with a package of pro-growth and pro-women policies could boost the growth rate by about 2 percentage points over time.