Middle Income Trap: The Ignored Role of Women

Abstract

This paper estimates the links between the middle-income trap and women’s employment with the dataset of 27 middle-income countries for 22 years. In line with the study’s prime objective, a panel logit regression model is used. The findings based on the conditional fixed-effects logistic regression show that the possibility of a middle-income country being a high-income economy is significantly associated with women’s employment rate, productivity, innovation, and institution. The results also show that female employment is an argument of escape strategy that has more impact than other variables.