A study on regional differences in female participation in developing countries and economies

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26590045
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Public finance/Public economy
• Research Institution: Hokkaido University
• Principal Investigator: Abe Yukiko 北海道大学, 経済学研究科, 教授 (50264742)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 地域差 / 女性就業率 / 経済発展段階

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this project, I build a framework to analyze the long-term changes in female participation rates during the course of economic development. Then the framework is applied to long-term data of Japan. I first demonstrate that the regional variations of female participation shrank over time: this pattern is confirmed by both the aggregate data of Census and the Employment Status Survey (ESS). Then using the microdata from the ESS, I show that the compositional changes in marital status and fertility account for the large fraction of convergence. In other words, the delay in marriage and the lowering fertility have had an effect to compressing regional differences in female participation.

Free Research Field

労働経済学