Helping when it matters: Optimal time for supporting women’s self‐employment in India

Abstract

Motivation: Governments support women's self-employment as a means to support women's empowerment. While they tend to do this by providing financial assistance, skills development and vocational training, they have not paid enough attention to entrepreneurship-related education in the school curriculum. The article addresses this research and policy gap. Purpose: While education may lead women to take up self-employment, anecdotal evidence also suggests that as women continue towards higher education, they tend to opt for wage employment. We investigate whether secondary school is the ideal time to encourage young women to take up self-employment. Approach and Methods: To test our hypothesis, we used two rounds of the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) dataset as it contains granular information about education and self-employment at the individual level. We analysed data in univariate and multivariate settings. Findings: Our results indicate that while education is a key dimension for women's self-employment earnings, its effects peak at moderate levels of secondary education. We find that the increase in business income for each additional year of schooling between classes 9 and 12 (ages 15 to 18) is more than four times that from classes 1-8 and over twice that beyond class 12. We also find that social factors, such as marriage and infrastructure, have implications for the returns of education to women's income from running a business. Policy implications: To improve women's economic and social empowerment, policy-makers should encourage women to attain higher levels of education, since it is a significant predictor of entrepreneurial endeavours. Second, the 9-12 curriculum should focus on making girls and young women more aware of entrepreneurship and encourage them to take up self-employment.

How Does Education Affect Health Beliefs? A Case of Women in India

“…We attempt to assess the role that the completion of different levels of school education play in forming health beliefs, that is whether the returns to education are constant for every additional level or whether the benefit from one level differs from other levels. This categorisation of education levels was suggested and reported by Awasthi et al (2021) although in the context of women entrepreneurship. Our key hypothesis is that the successful completion of various education levels has non-linear effects on the formation of health beliefs.…”

“…The extant literature usually measures education in terms of school years completed, which indicates the time spent in school, giving little idea about the individual, institutional, or interpersonal factors which influence the relation between schooling and health. 2 We follow Awasthi et al (2021) in choosing four categories: no education, primary level (0-8), secondary level (9-12) and higher secondary level (higher than 12), that is the first category includes women without any education (edu1); second group consists of women with less than secondary level of education (edu2); third category comprises women who have completed secondary but have less than higher secondary level of education (edu3) and the fourth group comprises women who have completed at least higher secondary level of education (edu4).…”

“…2 We follow Awasthi et al . (2021) in choosing four categories: no education, primary level (0–8), secondary level (9‐12) and higher secondary level (higher than 12), that is the first category includes women without any education (edu1); second group consists of women with less than secondary level of education (edu2); third category comprises women who have completed secondary but have less than higher secondary level of education (edu3) and the fourth group comprises women who have completed at least higher secondary level of education (edu4).…”

“…This categorisation of education levels was suggested and reported by Awasthi et al . (2021) although in the context of women entrepreneurship. Our key hypothesis is that the successful completion of various education levels has non‐linear effects on the formation of health beliefs.…”

Internet usage and the income gap between self‐employed individuals and employees: Evidence from China

“…2 The development of the self-employment sector can promote economic growth in developing countries (ILO, 1972). 3 Thus, it is important to study the self-employment sector of these countries, including that of China (Awasthi, Kumaraswamy, & Boeri, 2020;Guzman & Clair, 2021;Jacolin, Massil, & Noah, 2021;Ma & Li, 2022). During 1949During -1977, China operated as a centrally planned economy and banned the self-employment sector as being a capitalist market practice.…”