The Effect of Difference in Human Development Indices between Men and Women on Economic Growth

Achieving higher economic growth is one of the main objectives of all economies and countries around the world which will lead to an increase of social welfare, poverty alleviation, and inequality. Man power is one of the most important factors for economic growth. Since women make up half of the world’s population, they can be an effective factor for achieving this purpose; however, so far there has always been gender differences in various areas  including training, wage, health, and so on all around the world which can both have negative effect on economic growth and reduce economic welfare. Accordingly, any effort to remove gender differences in these areas, in addition to being an ethical value, is an essential policy to achieve goals regarding economic, social, and human development and is among the important issues of the nations. This paper seeks to explore the impact of gender differences such as those at the level of wages, education, and the indices of life expectancy of women and men upon economic growth in economies holding very high, high, medium, and low levels in human development during 2004-2012, by means of GMM model. The results of the paper show that for those countries with a very high level of human development, there is a negative relationship between economic growth and life expectancy, difference in the wage levels of women and men, and difference in education levels of women and men.  According to Boserup's theory, at the preliminary stages of economic growth, the gender gap will increase, but when a country goes through a distinct stage of development, this relation reverses, which is inferred from dependent variable interval of both groups and the variable concerning the difference in wages level of women and men in countries with low and medium human development index.