Gender Inequality And Its Impact On Economy – A Case Study Muslim Countries

Abstract

There is an immense need for muslim countries to recognize the importance of women especially in education and their well-being in order to establish a prosperous society from economic perspective. A cross-section data of 1forty-nine muslim countries was analyzed along with theoretical and empirical explanation of few outlier muslim countries who were economically robust but paradoxically showed low gender-equality profile. The results in few cases showed very different results than expected however those cases in general belonged to oil-rich countries, where their strong economy stands only on the export of oil and its derivatives. The extreme case of Qatar, which has a big per-capita income however its gender inequality profile was comparable to Pakistan, whose per-capita income was only three percent as that of Qatar. Moreover, Saudi Arab’s per capita income is ten times more as that of Pakistan but its gender equality profile much less than Pakistan’s. Apart from these few cases, the variable explaining the robustness of an economy, roughly regressed negatively with the gender inequality profile, showing that observing gender equality will have positive effects on the economy of muslim countries.