Climate Change Impact and Structural Reforms in Kiribati
KIRIBATI
B. Impact of Gender Equality on Growth
4.
This section conducts a growth decomposition exercise to provide illustrative insights
into the impact that gender inequality in Kiribati has on growth compared to peer countries. It
follows the approach in Hakura et al. (2016) who use a growth regression that controls for the
impact of initial income, investment, education, infrastructure, terms of trade, institutional quality,
population, and inflation. The variables are as follows: initial income per capita is measured as the
log of GDP per capita in the first year of each five year period; investment is measured using fixed
capital formation as a percentage of GDP; education is defined as the total average years of
schooling; infrastructure is measured based on an index of mobile phones, internet per 100 people,
access to water and electricity, and total air transportation per year; terms of trade is defined as the
ratio between export prices and import prices; institutional quality is from the International Country
Risk Guide index, which captures the quality of political institutions in a country; population is the
rate of dependent population growth; and inflation is measured by a dummy capturing periods of
average inflation of 15 percent and above. Each of the variables is constructed as the five-year
average except for the initial income per capita variable.
5. The analysis also includes indices on gender inequality (Box 1), legal institutions, and a
measure of income inequality. Legal institutions are measured using an index based on the dataset
from the World Bank Women, Business, and the Law. Values range from 0 to 6 and reflect the sum of
six dummy variables, with higher values indicating higher legal rights for women: 1) unmarried
women have equal property rights for immovable property; 2) married women have equal
inheritance rights; 3) joint titling of property is default for married couples; 4) married women can
get a job or pursue a profession; 5) adult married woman can open a bank account; and 6) married
woman can sign contracts (without permission from another family member). 6 Income inequality is
captured by the ratio of income held by the richest 20 percent of the population relative to the
poorest 40 percent.
The female legal equity index represents gender inequality in terms of legal framework, while the gender inequality
index represents gender inequality in terms of health, education, and economic empowerment.
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