What Explains Married Women Labour Force Participation in Ethiopia? An Application of Multinomial Probit Model
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Date
2021-06
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A.A.U
Abstract
Married women labour force participation has attracted the attention of many studies worldwide. There is however little empirical studies on the socio and economic factors that attribute to married women labour force participation in Ethiopia. This study aims to examine the factors that explain married women‟s labour force participation and employment using a national representative of Welfare Monitoring Survey (WMS). So far Ethiopia conducted five WMS starting in 1995 and the latest one conducted in 2015/16. This study makes use of the 2015/16 Welfare Monitoring Survey that covered all rural and urban parts of the country. This study, applied a multinomial probit model to investigate the socio demographic and economic characteristic determinants of married women labour force participation.
The results show that married women‟s is less likely to participate in the formal labour market if her husband has formal employment. That is, when a husband is employed in a waged employment, the labour force participation of married women decreases by 0.1%. As the number of children increases in a household married women labour force participation tends to increase by 0.7%. The regression results suggest that literate married women to be engage in Industry and Service employment are less likely to increase comparing to Agricultural Sector. Age is prolonged to likely increase married female labour force participation by 0.2% even though it is expected to have a diminishing effect at a certain level of age category.
It has been recommended that, education has a very high positive effect on married women labour force participation. Policies that promote education and create more job opportunities should be implemented. For example, re-schooling or training of the less educated married women, increasing vocational training and labour market information. This would encourage more married women to go to work, and thus generate the income required that would enable more families in the regions to be able to increase their living standards. The married women labour should also be given more attention in employment creation. This intervention however, should not focus only on urban areas otherwise, they will create imbalance in rural-urban married women labour force employment opportunities
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Married Women Labour Force participation in Ethiopia, Multinomial Probit Model