IMPACT OF ENERGY USE ON WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN BANGLADESH: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS
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2022-12
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North South Business Review
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13
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1
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Bangladesh achieved significant progress in the energy sector from 2009 to 2019, and it has helped the country to improve the socio-economic conditions of women. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no empirical time-series studies that explicitly address the relationship between electrification and women's empowerment. For an emerging country like Bangladesh, where women's work is often undervalued and society seems to be biased towards men, the demonstrated relationship between electrification and women's empowerment may have unveiled the immense impact that this might have had on the society. Hence, this paper investigates and quantifies the impact of electrification on women's empowerment, taking the general view that increasing electrification in Bangladesh results in empowering women in a community. Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Dickey-Fuller- GLS (DF-CLS), Johansen Cointegration methods have been used in this paper to explore this relationship. Moreover, the Granger-causality-test, Vector-Error-Correction Model (VECM) tests have also been applied to quantify this relationship. Our results support the view that energy use has a potential impact on the female laborforce in Bangladesh's both in the long and short run. Moreover, it also has a statistically significant effect on the female literacy rate in the long run. The Dynamic OLS (DOLS) results show that a 1-unit increase in energy consumption can lead to a 0.20 percent increase in female labor force participation in the long run other things remain unchanged. So, access to adequate electricity can provide the opportunity for employment creation to the poor female. To do so, the Bangladesh government should pay more attention to the development of off-grid electrification to better the socio-economic conditions of the unprivileged rural women in Bangladesh.
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North South University