Cross-country Correlations of Women's Employment, Fertility, and Growth in the East Asia: Empirical Analysis using Panel SVAR Model

Abstract

This paper empirically examines correlations between women’s employment, fertility and growth, using panel data of 9 East Asian countries, including Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore over the period of 1980-2008. With the cross-country panel data available from the World Bank on female labor force participation rates, total fertility rates, and economic growth rates in East Asian countries, we analyzed correlations between women’s employment, fertility and growth by estimating impulse response functions and variance decomposition, using the panel structural VAR model with imposed long-run restrictions. The results of the empirical panel analysis show that the impact of the other two variables on the target variable is about 6-11%, which is smaller than the 20-40% range obtained from the time series analysis conducted on the variables in each individual country. The study shows that the endogenous correlations among women’s employment, fertility and growth across 9 East Asian countries exist; however, the degree is much smaller as compared to the correlations of these variables in each country. This is because immigrant workforce, especially that of women, still has a meagre presence in the region’s entire workforce, thus having a negligent impact on the women’s employment, fertility and growth in the region. Unlike EU member countries, countries in the East Asia haven't been able to coordinate their economic policies, and workforce mobility is very low due to the lack of legal instruments that promote such mobility.