Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lahai, John Idriss

Titel

Locating Inequality in the Formal and Informal Economic Sector

Ist Teil von

• Gender-Responsive Governance in Sierra Leone, 2023, Vol.1, p.54-80

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter shifts the discussion to the economic foundations for gender inequality by exploring the 'gendered structures' of negative economic growth between 1970 and 2021. The analysis begins with the gendered dynamics of the state of the economy after independence in 1961. It then examines the gender-based eruption of uncontrolled inflation levels, the impact of external debts, and the emergence of gender-based discrimination in the labor force, noting that stereotypes around 'what women can and cannot do' resulted in the feminization of some sectors. It also focuses on the division of labor and the preferential employment of men in the formal economy, which was reinforced by the impact that fertility rates had on the employability of women in the income-generating labor force. Time-series statistical analysis is used to understand the effect of higher female fertility rates on the economic decline between 1961 and 2002. Emphatically, in a patriarchal setting such as Sierra Leone, where men were (and still are) essentially considered the heads of the household, women's contributions in the formal and informal economy were not only overshadowed by the men. They (the men) also dictated women's economic activities, which led to the creation of an engendered class distinction between women (the lumpen-proletariats) and men (the lumpen-bourgeoisie) of Sierra Leone's rogue economy. It is also observed in this chapter that, in such situations where women were either employed or engaged in personal agro-economic activities, societal diktats (on who has ownership rights to women's income) robbed women of their financial independence. Moreover, even without being told, the increasing number of children in homes (where they were denied the right to determine their reproductive rights) created the conditions that prevented women from saving their income. This chapter explains the link between higher fertility rates, the poor economic choices of the regime, and negative economic growth. It investigates the long- and short-term relationship between fertility rates and economic growth as well as the impact of women's empowerment on economic growth in Sierra Leone. There is a large and growing body of theoretical and empirical work debating whether politically motivated gender inequality in the labor force has an impact on positive economic growth. This, however, was never likely when the rogue economy of blackmarketeering and smuggling overseen by the politicians and policymakers themselves dwarfed the already dysfunctional formal economic sector. It was in between these divisions that the gender distribution of labor in Sierra Leone played out. However, all the variables at their first differences exhibit some stationarity. Furthermore, the Augmented Dickey Fuller and Phillips Perron tests were applied to all variables at level and at first difference to formally establish their order of integration.