Investigating the Relationship between Financial Access and Women's Economic Empowerment in Middle Eastern Countries

Women's economic empowerment is related to human rights and social justice and is very important for human development. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has shown that women's economic empowerment plays an important role in eliminating gender discrimination and sustainable development. Also, increasing women's economic empowerment through access to and control of valuable resources has positive effects on the well-being of women and the next generation, and therefore, women's economic empowerment also contributes to human capital and human capabilities. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of financial access on women's economic empowerment in Middle Eastern countries using generalize method of moments (GMM) panel data from 2004 to 2018. The results showed that economic empowerment increases with improving financial access, so that with a 1% increase in the number of commercial banks branches, economic empowerment increases by 0.37%. Also, the variables of life expectancy, education and cost of living have a positive and significant relationship and the variable of GDP per capita has a significant and negative relationship with economic empowerment. Therefore, it is suggested that governments, organizations and policy makers consider measures to facilitate, improve and increase the granting of self-employment loans to women in order to activate them in society and the labor market. Also, by providing programs to increase the level of education of women in society and by implementing development plans and programs and in general by providing comprehensive services to increase women's health improves women's economic empowerment.