Do political and social globalization promote female labour in Bangladesh? An empirical reassessment

Abstract

This study unfolds inverted -U nexus between female labour and political globalization through the lens of autoregressive distributed lag bounds test approach based on annual data from 1984 -2019 in Bangladesh. Political globalization initially fosters female workforce and after attaining a maximum threshold level, this slowly declines. This reinforces the evidence that, initially female absorption in labour market ascends via creation of employment opportunities in service sector for educated female labour and in industrial sector for the less educated. Consequently, the demand for female labour reduces significantly as the country becomes reliant more on import- based automated industries. This non- linear quadratic inverted U relation holds in short run and in the long run. This study also divulges that social globalization has negative and significant impact on female labour in the short- run, possibly corroborating persistent gender inequality in ICT for uneducated female labour. This research disentangles that interactive term of political and social globalization has positive and significant impact on female labour in the short- run. This positive effect is strongly significant in long run as well, supporting the fact that political globalization has the moderating role to subside gender disparity in the ICT sector for educated women. This research obtains conclusive evidence for stable long run inverted U relation between female labour and political globalization. This co-integrating relation holds under presumption of endogenous structural break. Findings of this study are important for formulating right policies to promote female labour in Bangladesh.