Gender equality, education, economic growth and religious tensions nexus in developing countries: A spatial analysis approach

Asim Iqbal; Shafiqul Hassan; Haider Mahmood; Muhammad Tanveer

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11394

Gender equality, education, economic growth and religious tensions nexus in developing countries: A spatial analysis approach

Heliyon. 2022 Nov 3;8(11):e11394. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11394. eCollection 2022 Nov.

Authors

Asim Iqbal¹, Shafiqul Hassan², Haider Mahmood³, Muhammad Tanveer⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Economics, Division of Management and Administrative Science, University of Education, Lahore, Pakistan.
² College of Law, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, 11586, Saudi Arabia.
³ Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173 Alkharj, 11942, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Department of Business Administration, Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

Gender inequality is a more pronounced phenomenon in developing countries, which may be rooted in poor governance, and inadequate social and religious institutions. Therefore, this research tests the effects of religious tensions, governance, economic growth, and education on gender equality in a panel of 59 developing countries from 1995-2015. Moreover, religious tensions may have spillovers in neighboring countries in this modern age of media and globalization. Therefore, we apply Spatial Durbin and Autoregressive models to consider spatial autocorrelation in the religious tensions model. We find that both gender equality and religious tensions have spillovers in neighboring countries. Moreover, reducing religious tensions and increasing economic growth promote gender equality and have positive spillovers in neighboring countries as well. Bureaucratic quality has a positive effect on gender equality in home countries and has insignificant spillovers on gender equality in the neighboring countries. However, education could not affect gender equality in developing countries.

Keywords: Bureaucratic quality; Education; Gender equality; Religious tensions; Spatial dependency.