Yselle Flora Malah Kuete presents Does structural change benefit women? Firm-level evidence from the services sector in Cameroon

Yselle Flora Malah Kuete presents at the WIDER Seminar Series on 31 May 2023.

Does structural change benefit women? Firm-level evidence from the services sector in Cameroon

Abstract

This study aims to determine whether changes in employment in the tertiary sector in Cameroon are (de)feminizing and what the drivers are. The study uses data from 75 firms in the Centre, Littoral and West regions of Cameroon, collected from the 2009 and 2016 World Bank enterprise surveys. All firms in the sample are formally registered and belong to the services sector. Accounting decomposition methods are used for the analysis. Preliminary evidence shows that the feminization of employment has been observed mainly in the retail and wholesale sectors, while the transport sectors remain highly defeminizing. Competition with informal enterprises and barriers to access to electricity, transport and IT infrastructure appear to be the determining factors of these patterns.

About the presenter

Yselle Flora Malah Kuete is a researcher in Development Economics and Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Management of the University of Yaoundé 2 in Cameroon. Her research focuses on issues of economic diversification, structural transformation, participation in global value chains and welfare implications in developing countries. Her latest publication in The Oxford Handbook of the Economy of Cameroon looks at the contribution of structural transformation to productivity growth in Cameroon.

WIDER Seminar Series

The WIDER Seminar Series showcases the latest research on key topics in development economics. It provides a forum for senior and early-career researchers, both in-house and external, to present recent and ongoing work related to UNU-WIDER’s current work programme.

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