Discovering the Connection Between Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Complexity: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

Women’s participation and support in the business sector have recently emerged as essential to economic diversification in developing countries such as Pakistan. Women entrepreneurs can help a country progress by expanding trade. The impact of women’s entrepreneurship on economic complexity is still underexplored.  The current research aims to fill a lacuna in previous studies by determining the impact of women's entrepreneurship on economic complexity in Pakistan that was less apparent in extant literature in the case of Pakistan, to the best of the researchers' knowledge. Annual time-series data from 1991 to 2021 have been collected for the present research. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound method has been utilized for analysis. The findings demonstrate that women’s entrepreneurship has positively and significantly impacted economic complexity in the long term. At a 1% significance level, a 1% increase in female entrepreneurship raises economic complexity by 0.269%. The participation of women in employment raises productivity, which in turn raises diversification and innovation, as well as the economic complexity in a country. Thus, it is essential to improve gender equality by offering educational and entrepreneurial possibilities for women. Furthermore, it provides employment-related skills and the fundamental level of business loans.